Hats and Hierarchy in Gustave Courbet's \"The Meeting

$Page 1: Hats and Hierarchy in Gustave Courbet's \"The Meeting$
Hats and Hierarchy in Gustave Courbet's "The Meeting"Author(s): Ting ChangSource: The Art Bulletin, Vol. 86, No. 4 (Dec., 2004), pp. 719-730Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4134460 .

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Hats and Hierarchy in Gustave Courbet's The Meeting

Ting Chang

This essay proposes a new reading of Gustave Courbet's The

Meeting, better known as Bonjour Monsieur Courbet, through a sustained focus on elements normally considered to be minor details-the hats, beards, canes, and gestures in the painting (Fig. 1). In a composition of such striking economy, each

component takes on heightened, perhaps even iconographic, significance. Before proceeding any further, I should state at once that the latter term is used advisedly. Iconography as an art historical practice, particularly in the study of premodern and early modern art, has long been under critical reassess- ment.' One aim of this essay is to address the issue of inter-

pretations of nineteenth-century art by considering the limits of certain interpretative methods associated with iconography and iconology.

By focusing on The Meeting, I argue for expanded possibilities of signification associated with the hats, beards, and canes in Courbet's painting. Clustered around these appar- ently anodyne objects were diverse connotations of class, submission, and sovereignty that circulated through language in nineteenth-century France. My scrutiny here is not on the

history of dress but on the intersections between a certain

linguistic inheritance and visual representation.2 I suggest that The Meeting engaged with a multiplicity of expressions, proverbs, puns, and jokes in a way that registered Courbet's claim of autonomy. At the same time, the allusions to lan-

guage inflected his message with ambiguity. Although it remains arguable whether the correspondence between representation and locution was purely fortuitous or actually intended by the artist, the numerous seams merged nonetheless into a compelling network of connotations.

Reference to hats in The Meeting immediately conjures up one of the ur-texts of art historical methodology, Studies in

Iconology, which Erwin Panofsky opened by recounting that on seeing him on the street, an acquaintance had lifted his hat.3 The vignette allowed Panofsky to introduce his distinc- tions between the perceptible element (a man removes his

hat), the iconographic meaning (a greeting), and the icono-

logical significance (the "intrinsic meanings," or the system of salutations and values from which this particular ritual derived its import). Fundamental to Panofsky's enterprise was the assumption that the lifting of the hat contained a

single, univocal signification underpinned, in turn, by a dominant and univocal code. For Panofsky, the key to decipher- ing artistic expression and the master code that informed it resided in the identification of certain literary sources. The texts helped to elucidate the global tendencies of a culture and thus the specific work of art.

Yet what if the hat and the act of its removal were to

contain not one but several layers of signification that clashed with one another? What if, in place of a clear conclusion, the sources led to more contradictions? It has been observed often enough that references became increasingly obscure

and hermetic in the nineteenth century, giving way to poly- morphous primitivism and nonreferentiality. If artistic ex-

pression was no longer recognizable as the direct and un-

equivocal symptom of a larger, consistent order, a part that

unproblematically expressed the whole, then the pursuit of

literary sources and documentary evidence would cause the

interpreter to circle around the work without ever arriving at an understanding. In the event that iconographic-type inter-

pretation no longer guaranteed results, by what methods and with what aids could one make sense of the work of art? Or, more to the point, how did pictures convey meaning in the nineteenth century?

For practitioners of the social history of art, an analysis of the attendant conditions and ideologies and the reception of a work of art was vital to the understanding of signification. Courbet's oeuvre has been valued in this respect for its

availability to historical inquiry and iconographic-type expla- nations. Any condensed bibliography would necessarily include Meyer Schapiro's early essay on Courbet and popular culture; Linda Nochlin's discovery of the precise sources for The Meeting; T. J. Clark's book on the conflicts that animated the artist's work; James Rubin's study of the anarchist philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in relation to Courbet; and Klaus Herding's essays on the artist's persona and synthetic interpretations of his work.4

Michael Fried uniquely departed from the problematic of

meaning in the ordinary sense. Extending his ideas on be-

holding and absorption in eighteenth-century French painting to the end of the nineteenth century, Fried investigated what he termed the ontological condition of painting and Courbet's physical fusion with the canvas as painter and

beholder.5 This inimitable project aside, the search for visual rather than textual material has been dominant in Courbet

studies, supplanting the logocentric premise of iconography. The long-accepted idea, dating to the nineteenth century, that Realism quarried vernacular imagery and popular culture for unmediated transfer on canvas stimulated the schol-

arly hunt for quotidian, often ephemeral, illustrations. The

study of the political, cultural, and socioeconomic conditions that shaped artistic production as well as the examination of visual sources have been highly rewarding in Courbet studies, but these methods have nonetheless reached a point of di-

minishing returns. Attention at this juncture to untried ap- proaches may yield new possibilities of interpretation.

Jacques Ranciare has asserted that art demonstrates the existence of meaning in what appeared to be meaningless, pointing out enigmas in what seems self-evident.6 In Ran- ciere's conception, representation comprised two essential elements, the visible and the utterable, in a hierarchical

relationship: "la parole fait voir."7 The spoken word helped one to see. In short, Ranciere emphasized the irreducible coexistence of the verbal and the visual in the work of art.



720 ART BULLETIN DECEMBER 2004 VOLUME LXXXVI NUMBER 4

1 Gustave Courbet, The Meeting (La Rencontre), 1854. Montpellier, Musee Fabre (photo: Frederic Jaulmes)

I will argue that the force of The Meeting resides in the strain between the verbal and the nonverbal. Put differently, the signification of the painting exists in the tensions between the visible, the utterable, and the unutterable. It was the bind between what was visible on the canvas and what Cour- bet could not pronounce aloud that formed the crux of the

painting, namely, the negotiations between the artist and his

patron, Alfred Bruyas, at the center of the triple portrait. The

visible, the spoken, the unspoken, and the unspeakable con-

veyed Courbet's project, telling a story that at times contra- dicted the official version on the canvas. While it has been

argued that the pictorial structure of The Meeting renders its

message transparent, I propose that a subterranean intermin-

gling of words, signs, expressions, and images complicated its

signification. The words came from the straightforward lan-

guage of daily life as well as the more allusive and metaphoric articulation of proverbs. I argue that the popular and literary references represented a landscape of associations for viewers

in the nineteenth century, a store of meanings that perme- ated all levels of symbolic expression and inflected Courbet's painting.8

The visible, we know: the artist is being welcomed to Mont-

pellier by his host, the latter accompanied by his servant, Calas. The form was not only visible but also absolutely familiar to nineteenth-century viewers. Courbet's source, long identified as the late medieval legend of the Wandering Jew, was among the most frequently recurring vernacular images in Europe. In the classic formula, the fabled wanderer, con- demned to travel the earth for mocking Christ on the road to

Calvary, met two village burghers to whom he recounted his endless journey. Over the centuries the motif became so entrenched in almanacs that an untrained viewer with little or no literacy would have recognized it with ease.9

Nochlin was the first art historian to identify the specific prints on which Courbet based his composition, a discovery that was published in the Art Bulletin in 1967.10 Keeping in



HATS AND HIERARCHY IN GUSTAVE COURBET'S THE MEETING 721

mind Ranciere's demand that the spoken word complete the act of seeing, one can reconsider to advantage the art historian's prior discovery. Courbet's choice of an illustration whose key point was a conversation between three men is

significant. In the print produced in Le Mans, Le vrai portrait du juif errant, the schematic faces were rendered with suffi- cient detail to show the act of speaking (Fig. 2). The bour-

geois in the middle, extending his three-cornered hat in the direction of the traveler, has twisted his head and shoulders toward his companion. His open mouth and engaged expression unmistakably indicate speech. Most likely he is signaling to his colleague the journeyman's arrival.

Although the print bears the inscription "Les bourgeois de la ville parlant au Juif errant," the representation unambigu- ously shows the two burghers talking to each other instead of

addressing the traveler. The only acknowledgment of the outcast is the hat belonging to the bourgeois, placed next to the traveler's long walking stick and near the center of the

image. Courbet significantly did not render speech in his version; instead, the three men greet each other through silent gestures. They do not rely on words, and their lips are sealed. In contrast to the compositional source, Bruyas, the man in the middle extending his hat, has turned away from his servant in order to greet Courbet. Unlike the analogous figure in the print, the body of Bruyas is not twisted in the

painting: his face, arm, and torso are all oriented in the same direction, toward the artist. The focus of The Meeting is on the

divergent ways in which Bruyas and his servant greet Courbet. The two local men do not talk to each other, the very possibility of speech being denied by the patron's surfeit of facial hair. Indeed, a copious mustache and beard mask his lips entirely. Only Courbet's mouth is unconcealed, but he visibly prefers to gesticulate.

Speech was imposed only in 1855 by the critics and viewers at the Exposition Universelle a year after Courbet painted the

joint portrait. The artist wrote to his patron that The Meeting was initially thought to be too personal and pretentious, but that it proved successful at the Exposition Universelle within

days."1 Although he always used the original title, by early May 1855 he reported to Bruyas that his canvas had been renamed by the public: "In Paris they call it Bonjour, Monsieur Courbet . 1..."12 Only on one occasion did the picture's owner use the new title, in a reply to the painter's letter in 1855, "Bonjour! Monsieur Courbet, at their Exhibition." Bruyas alluded here to both the renaming of the canvas and Courbet's independent "Pavilion of Realism," the exhibition Courbet set up on the edge of the 1855 world's fair as a challenge to the official selection of contemporary art.13 Neither artist nor patron objected that the popular title overlooked their real ambitions for the painting. To both men the work character- ized their vision of modern art. Elsewhere I have examined the prehistory of The Meeting, a canvas that Bruyas wanted to depict his full participation in artistic production.14 To convey his desire, the patron sent Courbet the photograph of a painting he had commissioned a year earlier from Octave Tassaert.15 In The Painter's Studio, also a joint portrait of the artist in the company of Bruyas and his servant, it was the patron who sat in front of the easel (Fig. 3). Bruyas speaks confidently about the work in progress while Tassaert listens. Although not quite as marginal as the servant and certainly

2 The True Portrait of the Wandering Jew, as Seen Passing through Avignon, April 22, 1784, colored woodcut print, 18th-19th century. Paris, Musee des Arts et Traditions Populaires (photo: J. G. Berizzi, ? Reunion des Mushes Nationaux/Art Resource, NY)

not as indifferent, it was plain that Tassaert was subordinate to the patron. Bruyas sent a photograph of this painting, noting on the back, "Dear Courbet, think carefully, reflect

upon the subjects I am sending you. It is the true poem of modern painting."'16

For his part, Courbet rejected the hierarchy of patron and artist as depicted by Tassaert. The artist replied that he hoped never to paint for money or approbation.'7 Claiming their recent friendship to be the inevitable meeting of like minds, the artist understood the photograph as a show of esteem rather than a command from Bruyas. In contrast to the

unassuming Tassaert, Courbet held a conception of himself as an artist that bordered on the messianic. The new title

given by the Paris public in 1855, the enunciation of a greeting, revealed a misunderstanding of The Meeting. What was too personal and pretentious in the painting, the contradic-

tory goals of Courbet and Bruyas, were obscured by the added words of welcome. The title Bonjour Monsieur Courbet

effectively reduced the work to a simple genre painting of three men and a dog.

The critics in 1855 recognized the artist's insubordination, which they soon magnified in print. Edmond About was

among the few to mention Bruyas, writing that "his admirer and friend, M. B., comes to meet him and greets him very politely. Fortunio, I mean M. Courbet, waves his hat in a

grand fashion and smiles at him from the top of his

beard....18 He further quipped that Courbet was the only person important enough to stop the rays of the sun.'9 Quil- lenbois's famous caricature showed Bruyas and Calas on their

knees, genuflecting to the artist. The servant's hat has col-

lapsed into a crumpled rag, while Bruyas holds out an in- verted dunce cap, manifestly panhandling.20 In Quillenbois's version, the difference between the subordinate figures and the artist's exaggerated beard, hat, and walking stick in the

lampoon merely overstated what Courbet implied. The artist's physical and moral superiority to his patron in the paint-




3 Octave Tassaert, The Painter's Studio (L'Atelier du peintre), 1853. Montpellier, Mus&e Fabre (photo: Frederic Jaulmes)

ing was mocked for its impertinence and conceit. Although highly amusing and informative to a degree, contemporary reviews, a classic primary source for the art historian, are of limited value here in decoding the painting's reception. Even a reading that is alert to what the critics left unsaid in 1855 would do little more than state the obvious: that Courbet's demotion of his patron provoked mockery and offense.

Yet the painting itself illustrates a more delicate balance among the three men. Certain gestures, objects, and poses favored the artist, while others privileged the patron. Con- trary to About's witticism, Bruyas and his servant did stop the rays of the sun-only a little, to be sure, and in a noticeably more modest way than Courbet. The patron's cane casts a mere inch of shadow on the ground. Everything was carefully calibrated, of course. The servant Calas is the most deferential of all: he bows his head to avoid meeting Courbet's gaze. His slouching shoulders, awkwardly splayed feet, and manner of gripping his hat and cane all convey a humble servitude. In contrast, Courbet has stepped forward with assurance on the opposite side, his thick legs and robust torso implying that he is the strongest of the three. His head is held high, and the chin's jaunty angle emphasizes that he boasted the longest beard. Courbet made an effort to tone down the swagger yet allowed pentimenti on the canvas to draw even more attention to his beard. The signs of change hinted at an unspeakable superiority. What he diminished in one area was in any case more than repaid by the walking stick in his right hand and the light, broad-rimmed hat in his left. Although Cour- bet has duly removed the hat in greeting, the courtesy is offset by his unwieldy, stately pose and massive form, suggesting confrontation and contest.

Bruyas, in the middle, occupies an ambiguous position. Carefully rendered by Courbet, his outfit of shirt, tie, and

jacket with fussy striped trim, gloves, trousers, and shoes all denote a city dweller, a bourgeois. And obviously a man who cared about his appearance; for a portrait by Alexandre Cabanel, Bruyas left in the artist's studio his suit and glasses to ensure their accurate representation.21 In Courbet's painting, the patron politely extends his hat in the direction of his

guest. The gesture is expected, but the hat is strangely uni- dentifiable, all the more so when compared with the promi- nent tricorne hat of the bourgeois in the prototype. Within the painting, it looked equally anomalous in comparison with the headwear of the others. The servant grasps a clearly defined cap that was stiff and servicelike, embellished with a

gold band and two buttons to reflect the elegance of his

employer. At the opposite end, Courbet holds a large, deep, upturned hat to protect him from the elements. The object in Bruyas's hand, however, is formless and indecipherable. Curiously floppy and shapeless, it cannot be distinguished as a straw hat or a hunting cap, nor a hard bowler or a soft bonnet.22 At the very heart of the canvas, the patron's hat remains suspended like a mysterious, dark spot.

It was by way of the strange, illegible formulation of this detail that one could grasp Courbet's project. The very indis- tinctness of Bruyas's accessory, its resistance to identification, constituted a silent challenge to the patron's power. The play of hats, beards, canes, clothes, gestures, and their multiple allusions shifted authority back and forth, hinting at the contest between patron and artist, yet also veiling the frictions.

A covert operation of this kind was more than feasible in a

country whose elite and popular cultures were replete with references to the signification of accessories. Although fiction

occupies an undefined role in the historian's inquiry, one can nevertheless make use of the authentic insights offered

by literature through the veracity of descriptions and the




logic of stories that expose the reasoning and the imagina- tion of an era, as Nicole Pellegrin and Daniel Roche have argued.23 Honore de Balzac's Les illusions perdues of 1843 contain extensive observations on the physiognomy, dress, and headwear of the characters in relation to their status and destiny. One's attire, particularly the hat, constituted a crucial signifier of social standing. Lucien de Rubempre, the aspiring poet from Angoul&me at the center of the novel, admired the ways in which women seemed better able than men to negotiate the codes of Parisian dress: "There is an indefinable art to wearing a hat: put it too far back and it looks cheeky; too far forward, you look sly; too far to the side, and it is casual; elegant women wear their hats however they like and it always looks good."24 Clothing was an occult yet powerful index not only to society but even more to one's intimates. The first sign of the rift between Rubempre and his lover, Mme de Bargeton, was when each began to disapprove of the other's appearance. The poet rushed to Palais Royal to be outfitted from head to foot, and he duly found the area lined with milliners.

Dress, as Daniel Roche has noted, is a language of the body, an expression of desires comprising contradictory im- pulses and needs that shape identity to a considerable degree.25 The historian suggested that the fundamental importance of clothing could be gauged in the abundance of proverbs on the subject. Without undertaking a methodical study of relevant proverbs, Roche recommended such an inquiry to reveal the dual tendency in sartorial social relations: on the one hand, to judge by appearance and bearing, on the other, to distrust another's attire because of the deceptive nature of external form.26 It is not surprising that the majority of French expressions advocated the latter atti- tude. One such proverb, "L'habit ne fait pas l'homme et la barbe ne fait pas le philosophe," observed that clothes do not make a man, nor does a beard make a philosopher.27

In the case of Courbet and Bruyas, both were well-dressed young men who went to Paris to fulfill their ambitions. Dur- ing his year-long visits to the capital in the 1850s, Bruyas frequented not only museums and art studios but also grand haberdashers, much to his father's alarm. His many outfits and hats, and the personae they lent him, were recorded in photographs and portraits commissioned in Paris and Mont- pellier (Fig. 4). The precise date of the photograph attributed to Georges d'Albenas (ca. 1854) is not known, but the large hat displayed prominently on the sitter's lap bears a notable resemblance to Courbet's hat in The Meeting and suggests that Bruyas wished to (re)claim this important accessory. Courbet also fashioned himself in the metropolis, and his makeovers were liberally depicted in self-portraits and photographs. The proud son of the Franche-Comte was on his way to success in Paris when he met Bruyas, an art collector and a provincial from another region of France. Bruyas bought Courbet's work and cultivated his friendship. The classic trajectory of province to capital was briefly but significantly reversed when Courbet left Paris at the patron's invitation to paint in Montpellier.28

The artist did not have to read Balzac to understand the signifying power of hats. Maxims in French popular culture made abundant use of the article, and Courbet himself employed such idioms, often in a context of authority and

repression. Complaining in January 1852 about current political turbulence and his fear of police surveillance of his activities,29 for example, he used the expression 'j'ai vomi

plein mon chapeau de bique" (I [was so distressed that I] puked a hatful). In this and many other instances, the hat had overdetermined valences as apparel, as social and political signifiers, as metaphors and idioms.

To wear a hat, "porter chapeau," was an expression that indicated having a position in high society, whereas to wear a

cap, "porter casquette," was reserved for the working masses in the nineteenth century.30 The hat and all the gestures made with it were supreme indices of social class. The verb

chapeauter historically meant not only to wear a hat but also to

occupy a superior position in a hierarchy. "Ecrire sur son

chapeau" (to write on one's hat) meant to declare an affili- ation, to "wear it on one's sleeve." "Travailler du chapeau" (literally, to work from the hat) meant to be a little crazy.31 "Frere (au) chapeau" (a brother in a hat) referred to a

layman or monk not entitled to a hood when escorting a

superior of his religious order; in a figurative sense, it meant a person in a subordinate position.

All the expressions related to lifting, removing, or simply touching the hat connoted salutation and respect, used in numerous examples: "mettre la main au chapeau," to touch one's hat; "donner un coup de chapeau ta quelqu'un," to raise one's hat to another; "saluer quelqu'un chapeau bas," to

greet someone with hat removed; or "tirer le chapeau bas," to

pull down one's hat. There was one instance, however, in which bowing to a hat was an act of terrible subjugation. "Saluer le chapeau de Gessler," to greet Gessler's hat, was derived from the legend of William Tell, a patriot who refused to submit to the tyrannical occupier, Gessler, represented in absentia by a generic hat. For this refusal Tell was

imprisoned and eventually forced into the adventure of

shooting an apple placed on his son's head. The story became familiar through the legend as well as its literary and theatrical versions in the nineteenth century.32 An earlier

expression, "voila un beau chapeau que vous lui mettez sur la tete," that's a fine hat you put on his head, also referred to the dishonor or slander of an individual.33

The long-standing flexibility of the hat to indicate respect and/or abasement is specific to French idiom in this study, but a striking illustration can be found in a different context

altogether. Sigmund Freud discussed in The Interpretation of Dreams his childhood desire to attain mastery of Christian

antiquity to the point of identifying with Hannibal, the Jewish leader who led the Carthaginians to victory over Rome. These comments elicited a memory of boyhood walks with his father. On one such occasion the senior Freud recounted an incident long ago when he set out on a pleasant promenade, dressed in fine clothes and sporting a new fur hat. A stranger assaulted him, knocking off the latter and shouting, 'Jew! Get off the pavement!" When the young Freud learned that his father's only reaction had been to retrieve his soiled hat from the street, the son rejected it as "unheroic conduct" ill suited to the great patriarch who was holding his little hand.34 To alleviate his disappointment, the young Freud thought instead of Hannibal's father, who demanded from his son an oath of vengeance against the Romans. A father's hat, an




4 Attributed to Georges d'Albenas, photograph of Alfred Bruyas. Montpellier, Mus&e Fabre (photo: Fredfric Jaulmes)

object of humiliation in this instance, stimulated the son's desire for revenge through the mastery of classical history.

The hat had a symbolic potency for Freud that remained undiminished long into his adulthood. As an accomplished physician he had a dream in which he was wrongly accused of theft at the private clinic where he practiced. Exoneration came quickly and he was free to leave. "But [in the dream] I could not find my hat and could not go after all," Freud recounted. The wish for recognition as an honest man was both fulfilled and denied in the dream, and he concluded that the lost hat represented his ultimate unmasking as a dishonest man.35

For Courbet, as for Panofsky and Freud, the hat functioned

simultaneously to convey and to conceal meaning. Freud introduced free association in The Interpretation of Dreams as a method to trigger expansive clusters of signification, often

polyvalent and clashing in character, in order to unravel the

import of a dream.36 In a parallel fashion this essay explores the multiple and colliding layers of meaning in The Meetingby way of the complex realm of linguistic usage in nineteenth-

century France, a discursive world in which Courbet himself was unavoidably immersed. The aural and the visual, spoken and observed, language and image participated synchro- nously in the symbolic life of a community. Elements of The

Meeting show that the visible, rather than being subsidiary to the spoken word, as in Ranciere's conception, repeatedly encompassed both the utterable and the unutterable.

Why should Courbet, relentlessly in search of patronage and support, have made ambiguous allusions in his joint portrait with Bruyas? A year earlier, Bruyas had acquired major paintings by the artist at the Salon of 1853, The Sleeping Spinner and The Bathers. These two works announced Cour- bet's avant-garde ambition to reject the academic pieties and formulas followed by generations of well-trained artists. On the heels of his previous offerings, such as The Stone Breakers or A Burial at Ornans, Courbet made clear his desire to subvert the hallowed categories of painting.

Bruyas had his own reasons for associating with an artist of such controversial and refractory profile. It was precisely what he needed to add an avant-garde piquancy to his art collection in Montpellier, then composed of mostly obscure, provincial artists. On concluding the purchase in Paris, Bruyas immediately commissioned from Courbet a portrait known as

Portrait-Solution, or simply Alfred Bruyas. It was agreed that Courbet would shortly visit his new patron in Montpellier.

Later that autumn, Courbet recounted to Bruyas his famous luncheon invitation from the comte de Nieuwerkerke, France's directeur des beaux-arts.37 Courbet's extravagant rejec- tion of Nieuwerkerke's entreaty not to cause offense at the

Exposition Universelle could be read as a prefiguration of The Meeting.3 The artist's arrogance anticipated his proud stance in the joint portrait of 1854. Equally striking was the

similarity in his vocabulary and rhetoric to working-class dis- courses of the preceding twenty years. On reaching Paris in 1840 at the age of twenty-one, Courbet witnessed a key moment in the labor history of France. The atmosphere created

by general strikes in Paris and Lyons in 1833 and 1840, the

proliferation of trade associations, and the spread of utopian socialist ideas clearly did not leave Courbet indifferent to either the rhetoric or principles of the worker uprisings in his own negotiation with authority.39 The laborers' key demands of freedom, independence, and dignity and their vow to fight to the death became refrains in Courbet's discourse. A stone- cutter named Grignon exhorted his fellows to "live while

working or die fighting [Vivre en travaillant, ou mourir en

combattant]." The artist wrote to Bruyas in October 1853, "it is win or die [Ilfaut vaincre ou mourir]."40 The workers' rebuff of external authority and claim to self-definition also resonated in Courbet's account of the meeting with Nieuwerkerke. The

artist, too, asserted his inalienable right, telling Nieu- werkerke, "I was not only a painter but above all a man."41

And, like the striking laborers who mistrusted their bourgeois masters, Courbet refused the idea that the government could have anything acceptable to offer him.

This was not simply the pose of a rebellious adolescent in search of attention, as the reviewers charged. One critic

suggested that Courbet, frustrated by his unexceptional abil-

ity and desperate to be noticed, behaved like a man who "in order to make an entrance, deliberately wore his jacket back- ward .. ."42 The artist wanted to undermine the conventional

formulas of artistic achievement in order to reshape them to his own advantage. His goal was to create new categories, to use the vocabulary of landscape and genre paintings for the most consecrated art. History painting would be reformu- lated in such a way as to comprehend his representation of a village funeral or the return of farmers from a country fair as the equal of paintings by Raphael and Nicolas Poussin. Scale




played a role in this endeavor, as his paintings were always bigger than genre paintings, grandes machines filled with seem- ingly inconsequential, descriptive content, even if painted with flair. At 50 /4by 58/8 inches (129 by 149 centimeters) The Meeting would dwarf its predecessor by Tassaert, The Painter's Studio, a modest cabinet picture measuring 18/8s by 22 inches (46 by 56 centimeters).

In 1853 Courbet understood the stakes, of course. "I have burnt my bridges," he wrote to Bruyas apropos of the meeting with Nieuwerkerke. "I have quarreled openly with society. I insulted all those who put a spoke in my wheel. And now, here I am, alone, facing that society. It is win or die."43 The artist was aware that he had said too much. For the solitary combat that was a part of his persona, Courbet adopted the language of the labor movement. He introduced to his joint portrait with Bruyas the many layers of vernacular idiom, popular imagery, and personal experience of conflict. Pre- cisely because he alienated the government and now needed private support, Courbet wanted to affirm his sovereignty explicitly. Bruyas, after all, was hoping to add Courbet to his retinue of compliant artists, chiefly Tassaert and Auguste Glaize, minor genre painters who produced flattering pictures about his patronage and collection.44

That Courbet's family straddled both the bourgeoisie and the peasantry, crossing the boundaries of country and city, as T. J. Clark first noted, complicated the artist's position. His father was a farmer who owned land and property. His status as a landowning taxpayer qualified him to vote in the July Monarchy; for a time the senior Courbet held the venerable position of a local official. As Clark remarked, Regis Courbet enjoyed an aspiring bourgeois identity, "shuttling between Flagey and Ornans, exchanging his smock for his dress-coat and spats."45 No less than Bruyas but in a different way, the painter from Ornans was a fils de famille, the well-loved only son of indulgent, middle-class parents. Courbet himself pos- sessed land and stocks. Like Bruyas, he had a light and refined complexion, as opposed to the dark, rough features of Calas in The Meeting. The artist's robust form and athletic pose came not from hard labor but from natural agility, as we learn from his painted image and his reputation. It was yet another way in which he was stronger than Bruyas, the delicate, aesthete son of a banker. Only a few days before depart- ing for Montpellier in May 1854, Courbet wrote to his host and restated his rank as "a free man [un homme libre]."46 His ambition was to realize his position as an artist in society.

Nochlin earlier suggested that Eugene Sue's novel LeJuif errant, as well as the songs of Pierre-Jean de B&ranger and Pierre Dupont provided the "iconographic framework" for The Meeting. It was further noted that in the mid-nineteenth century, the motif of the Wandering Jew stood for the perse- cuted worker.47 In Courbet's oeuvre, manual work was represented in a confrontational manner in paintings such as The Stone Breakers of 1849 and The Peasants ofFlagey Returning from a Fair of 1850, and clearly the artist's choice to graft his own likeness in The Meeting on the print of the WanderingJew resonated with anxieties surrounding labor relations at the time.

Although the algorithm of power, subjection, and independence was hard to pin down in The Meeting, the equality of the three as men was salient, particularly during the early Second Empire, when the gains of earlier revolutions were at risk of

evaporating.48 Indeed, one of the fundamental demands of

striking workers in the preceding years was to be treated as the equal of their masters. That struggle for a common

humanity was expressed in Courbet's painting by the pres- ence of the dog. The artist placed the animal in the middle of the canvas, at its literal center, highlighting his difference from the three men and thereby adding a supplementary yet crucial detail to accentuate the shared humanity of the others. If the painting lacked the dog, one's attention would be drawn upward, toward the faces, the exchange of glances and

gestures. The opposite of an encouragement to engage in a cerebral, abstract contemplation, the dog serves to ground us instead in the countryside. The dog paradoxically calls our attention to the hat floating above its head.

Courbet's unspoken speech in the joint portrait articulates the very challenge of the avant-garde artist: How to make a

living, how to be sovereign and autonomous while requiring the support of others? How to realize one's ambitions without

being aggressively alienated from society, but equally, without

compromise? When Courbet reached Montpellier and produced the joint portrait commissioned by Bruyas, he lived up to the promise made only a day or two before leaving Paris of not forfeiting his principles in exchange for fame or fortune. The Meeting was the closest he ever came to that goal. Yet Courbet still had to exercise restraint. Instead of an absolute and explicit reversal of hierarchy, he resorted to mute accessories, clothes, gestures. No detail was spared in the painting: the artist is dressed in a white shirt whose left sleeve sparkles under the sun. Over the shirt he wears an ocher vest and red scarf. Such perfect grooming, improbable after a long journey, only accentuates his rank. On his back he carries the instruments of his vocation, symbolically weighty, yet hardly a burden. Courbet is able to travel at will, whereas Calas, at the

opposite end, remains bound to his employer in Montpellier. Even more striking, the artist's boots and hat are the color of the earth, making him seem firmly rooted in the land. Al-

though new to Montpellier, Courbet is the one who looked most in harmony with the landscape.

The dynamism of the composition moves from right to left as the viewer follows Courbet striding toward his patron. He must have disembarked from the coach some time ago, to

judge by the vehicle's distance from the foreground figures. The time elapsed is suggested by the imminent disappear- ance of the distant vehicle from the canvas altogether. Taking into account the turn of the road and the point at which they have met, Bruyas and his servant must have come from the direction opposite to that of the tiny coach. And they must have waited for the artist. Another possibility was that Cour- bet was already installed as a guest of his patron in Montpel- lier and went out for a day of plein air sketching. In that scenario, it was possible that his host decided to join him on one occasion. The midday sun would make the second op- tion unlikely, as it implied that Courbet worked a very short day. In any event, Bruyas clearly displaced himself, going to some effort to meet Courbet outside the city walls. It was yet another way in which the artist showed ambiguity in the hierarchy, the person obliged to travel the greater distance being, of course, the more subordinate.

"Porter le chapeau" in the nineteenth century meant to be responsible, to have a role of responsibility.49 "Un monsieur




a chapeau," a gentleman in a hat, denoted a bourgeois. Bruyas is not given such a clear attribute, as the viewer is left unsure if he holds a hat or a cap in his gloved hand. The

patron's position in the wealthy, responsible class remains

unquestioned, however, whereas Courbet's hat, so crisply rendered and distinct, actually makes his status more ambiguous. The hat should identify him as a bourgeois gentleman, but it is an identity that Courbet does not embrace, prefer- ring by far the part of artist, bohemian, and legislator.

Beyond such vernacular nuances of the hat, the working class harbored strong attitudes about dress. In the era of worker protests, a shoemaker named Savinien Lapointe wrote a text in which he drew attention to the different attire of workers and their masters as a major element of his rhe- torical strategy.50 Lapointe complained that when seen in a worker's smock, living in squalid rooms, eating poorly, and unable to provide for his family, he would only be rebuked by his employers for debauchery and excess.5 "I do not hide the fact that I am wary of these men in jackets," the shoemaker continued in his letter of grievance. "I fear that it is only a clever way to preserve the privileges of the new aristocracy.""'52 For him, class conflict was manifest in the donning of smocks

orjackets. In a climate of antagonism and scrutiny, Courbet's careful depiction of each outfit in the canvas was surely resonant.

In the configuration of class as signified by dress, Calas served as a foil in The Meeting for both Courbet and Bruyas. "Avoir toujours la main au bonnet" (always keep a hand on one's hat), an expression dated to the nineteenth century, was to be deferential at all times.53 Calas's manner of clutch-

ing his cap, his white-gloved thumb bisecting the dark visor, showed a man used to the automatic, split-second gestures of

lifting and replacing his hat whenever he came upon a bour-

geois. Calas was so respectful, moreover, that unlike the other two, he did not even dare to let his walking stick touch the

ground. And beside his hand, firmly gripped on the cane, a red shawl was draped over his arm, a surprisingly feminine

garment for his male employer. Apart from adding a bold color to the brown, yellow, and ocher tones of the servant's outfit, the red shawl surely referred to Courbet's Bathers (Fig. 5), the canvas that allegedly provoked Bruyas to exclaim, "Here at last is independent art. This painting belongs to me" at the Salon of 1853.54 In that canvas, a red shawl with the same fringe was suspended from a tree branch to the left of the nude bather, to whom it presumably belonged. Satirical attention had already singled out the shawl in a caricature published in Le Charivari.55 The matching garment carried discreetly by Calas in The Meeting was a private joke to be shared with Bruyas as a reminder of what united them. Coun-

terbalancing the ambiguities regarding hats, beards, and walking sticks, the red shawl alluded with humor to Courbet's controversial painting in the Bruyas collection."56 But even that reference was ambivalent, drawing attention to the patron's fragility-his need for extra clothing-as opposed to Courbet's virile robustness.

In the event that Bruyas took umbrage at the artist's am-

biguous representation, the insinuations of the painting could have been defended and dismissed as simply bonho- mie, as harmless teasing, masculine jocularity about masculine things. In this respect, the dog again acts as a counter-

poise to the men. He is carefully represented between the two

protagonists, accompanying his master and welcoming the

visitor, his obvious canine enthusiasm suggesting that it was all good fun. Courbet's joke of awarding himself the longest beard in The Meeting was, on one level, rather puerile. On

another, however, it becomes a detail dense with meaning. Making the beard at someone, "faire la barbe it quelqu'un," and making a straw beard, "faire barbe de paille," were

expressions signifying respectively to have the upper hand and to deceive.7" "A la barbe de quelqu'un" was to do some-

thing "in front of or to his beard," right under a person's nose, indifferent to transgression or affront, whereas to laugh into one's beard, "rire dans sa barbe," as the duc de Saint- Simon often wrote, was to dissimulate amusement at anoth-

er's expense.58 When employed in the masculine gender in the late nineteenth century, a beard (le barbe) referred to a backer or a pimp.59

Although traditional dicta intoned that whiskers did not make the man, "la barbe ne fait pas l'homme," in relations between women and men, power was always on the side of the beard: "du co6t de la barbe est la toute-puissance."60 Unfor-

tunately for Bruyas, an age-old wariness of redheads produced the adage that a man sporting a red beard and black hair was never to be trusted.6' Courbet might have chuckled into his own ample beard over the hidden allusions in the canvas, but he did not have the last laugh, as proverbs had

long admonished that the size of a beard was not commen- surate with wisdom: "longue barbe, courte science," long beard, little learning, and "en la grande barbe ne git pas le savoir," knowledge lies not in a big beard.62

The rich web of meanings drawn from popular, idiom-

atic, and literary expressions informed Courbet's unspoken contest with Bruyas in The Meeting. After burning his

bridges with the government at Nieuwerkerke's luncheon, Courbet, a guest at his patron's house a year later, was fully alert to his insecure position. And it is when the space of maneuvre is most confined that an avant-garde artist should resist. Courbet was far too privileged to identify with his proletariat counterparts, the humble housepaint- ers vulnerable to the exploitation of employers. Confais, a worker in the painting industry, in 1848 described the

plight of unemployed painters, obliged to gather at a

particular location each day to await work. "There they are," he exclaimed, "bent under [courbts] the yoke of chance and whim; often three days of work are followed by fifteen of total unemployment; and with each new job, a new master, new expectations, new tyrannies!!!""63 The co- incidental homonymy between the artist's surname and the image of overworked laborers bent down and de- formed by insecurity was surely one to avoid. Yet it was a sign of deference that the art critics actually wanted to find in The Meeting. As one caricaturist reproachfully and only half jokingly observed about Courbet's triple portrait, "the most bent over [le plus courb9] of the three is not the one

you would expect."''64 Resolutely upright and unbent by his vocation as artist, Courbet confronted his patron as a peer and a superior. It was that or deforming himself like the old stone breaker, "courbe sur son travail," in the painter's own description, on his knee, bound to his task, and




5 Courbet, The Bathers (Les Baigneuses), 1853. Montpellier, Musee Fabre (photo: Frederic Jaulmes)

completely hidden under a large hat that oddly resembled the one carried by Courbet in The Meeting.65

The domain of French expressions and the method of free association might open still another interpretation, whose possibility was hinted at in the faintest terms in the canvas: to toss or to break the walking stick and run. By the mid-nineteenth century the expressions "balancer sa canne" (to toss the cane) and "casser sa canne" (to break his walking stick) meant to break parole, to flee the law.66 "Etre en canne" (to be under a cane), a term that emerged from the link between the law and the rod, was to live at an authorized address after having completed one's sen-

tence.67 These idioms were in use in exactly the years 1867 to 1872, and there was an uncanny but absolutely fortuitous foreshadowing of Courbet's situation in 1873, when he left France for Switzerland after serving a prison sen- tence for his role in the Paris Commune. Still one more

imaginary scenario might have entailed Courbet being given his walking stick by the authorities: the expression "offrir une canne" meant to be dismissed and thus to be

unemployed.68 Or, even worse, the artist could have volun-

tarily surrendered his walking stick to the minister, "rendre sa canne au ministre," signifying to give up his life altogether.69

None of those options was particularly desirable in 1853 (nor in 1873), so after recounting his argument with Nieuwerkerke, Courbet wrote to Bruyas, imploring the latter to use his intelligence and wealth to "save us in our lifetime and allow us to enter a new era." Despite his in-

dependent stance in The Meeting, Courbet needed the good- will of his patron. The artist wished for the ailing Bruyas a rapid recovery: "spare yourself from fatigue," Courbet

urged. "Spare yourself even the effort of speech."70 From a painter who regularly provoked controversy through his words and actions, the advice was remarkable.

The artist and the patron each intended the painting to be a statement of his own principles, and the composition of a quasi-caricatural simplicity hinted at its importance.71 In the iconic joint portrait, recourse to idiomatic French allowed for a counterdiscourse, a suppressed, unspeakable friction with authority, just as maxims and proverbs artic- ulated through metaphor what could not be said directly in formal terms.72 To give the patron his due, the commis-




sion, unique in Courbet's career, permitted or even invited the artist's mute soliloquy, concealed in the very simplicity of design. Whether Bruyas was aware of the unflattering jokes cannot be determined from Courbet's letter to his sister in which he reported the patron's satisfaction with

him, so much that he wanted to pay for not only the

paintings but also the time the artist had spent in his home. "The painting that I produced for him is creating the greatest impression here and his compatriots are dying with jealousy."73

Troubling the alleged transparency of the motif, scattered across Courbet's canvas, the hats, beards, and canes afforded

points of opacity and resistance. Their simultaneous legibility and illegibility were rich with meaning; their allusions provided an alternative, secret narrative in the painting. The

rapport in art between the visible and the spoken noted by Ranciere took the modified form of a tension between the

visible, the utterable, and the unspeakable in Courbet's meet-

ing with Bruyas. It is possible to discern in the canvas incompatible linguis-

tic resonances of hats, beards, and walking sticks that ampli- fied the manifold significations of The Meeting. The layers of reference and insinuation collide with one another, at once

threatening and reinforcing the established hierarchy. And in the very clash of these contradictions, the artist's sover-

eignty can be both affirmed and displayed: Courbet is plainly not subordinate to his patron-but neither is Bruyas merely a fool.

In place of a conclusive victory on one side, a neat formulation of an enigmatic iconography, we could instead consider the work of art as a node, a multiple inter-

section, as in Freud's interpretation of dreams, in which one element could trigger multiple associations and, con-

versely, a single component could be represented by several figures.74 The web of lines crossed again and again, at different points, to mark different inflections. A hat removed could be a gesture of friendship or humiliation, and any number of signs. As the old expression went, "qui a bonne tAte ne manque pas de chapeaux," a sensible head is never uncovered.75

The obscurity of the patron's hat, a highly charged symbol pictured at the center of The Meeting, overdetermined by diverse meanings that ranged from the literary, the idiomatic, the cultural, and the political, demands

scrutiny. Analysis of the multiple connotations of the hat, beard, and cane in French culture is not intended here as

a variation on iconographic study, nor is the reference to maxims being proposed as an interpretative method for all works in which these accessories were painted by Courbet or any other artist.76'" What is being proposed is that con- nections, whether fortuitous or deliberate, between elements of The Meeting and long-standing expressions suggest another way in which signification could operate in the nineteenth century. To return to Ranciere's concise for-

mulation, art reveals meaning in the meaningless, enigma in the evident. The incommensurability of words and im-

ages, the writer's inability to exhaust the work of art, point to the still unlimited possibility of interpretation.

Ting Chang teaches in the Department of Art History and Commu- nication Studies at McGill University, Montreal. Her previous publications on Gustave Courbet's negotiations with Alfred Bruyas, his

major collector and patron in the 1850s, have appeared in the

Burlington Magazine and the Oxford Art Journal [Department of Art History and Communication Studies, McGill University, Montreal H3A 2T6].

Frequently Cited Sources

Chang, Ting, " 'The Meeting': Gustave Courbet and Alfred Bruyas," Burlington Magazine 138, no. 1122 (Sept. 1996): 586-91.

Chu, Petra ten-Doesschate, 1992, ed. and trans., The Letters of Gustave Courbet

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press).

, 1996, ed., Correspondance de Courbet (Paris: Flammarion). Duneton, Claude, and Sylvie Claval, eds., Le bouquet des expressions imagoes:

Encycloptdie thWmatique des locutions figurtes de la languefranCaise (Paris: Seuil, 1990).

Montrevnaud, Florence, Agnes Pierron, and FranCois Suzzoni, Dictionnaire de

proverbes et dictons (Paris: Le Robert, 1993). Nochlin, Linda, "Gustave Courbet's Meeting: A Portrait of the Artist as a

Wandering Jew," Art Bulletin 49 (1967): 209-22. Ranciere, Jacques, and Alain Faure, eds., La parole ouvriare 1830/1851 (Paris:

Union Gn6nrale d'Iditions, 1976). Trnsor de la langue franaise: Dictionnaire de la langue du XIXe et du XXe sikcles

(Paris: Centre National des Recherches Scientifiques, 1971), vol. 4.

Notes I thank the two anonymous reviewers for The Art Bulletin for their comments and Marc Gotlieb, above all, for his insightful advice, which greatly improved my essay. Two leading scholars of Courbet, Frederique Desbuis- sons and Michele Haddad, have generously shared their erudition with me over the years, and their comments on my paper presented at the conference "La production de l'immateriel: Theories, representations et

pratiques de la culture au XIXe si&cle," organized by the Soci6te des Etudes Romantiques, Lyons, 2003, encouraged me to refine my argument. Charles Merewether commented on an early draft of the essay, and Britta McEwen provided efficient assistance in the final stages of completion. Financial and institutional support from the Social Sciences and Human- ities Research Council of Canada and the Getty Research Institute allowed me to write this essay under ideal conditions. My deepest thanks go to Brian Grosskurth, as always. All translations are mine unless indicated otherwise.

1. Reconsiderations of Panofsky's art historical methodology in recent

years include Giulio Carlo Argan, "Ideology and Iconology," Critical En-

quiry 2, no. 2 (1975): 297-305; Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson, "Semiotics and Art History," Art Bulletin 73 (1991): 174-208; Brendan Cassidy, Iconog- raphy at the Crossroads (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Chris- tine Hasenmuller, "Panofsky, Iconography and Semiotics," Journal of Aes- thetics and Art Criticism 36 (1978): 289-301; Irving Lavin, ed., Meaning in the VisualArts: Views from the Outside (Princeton: Institute for Advanced Study, 1995); Donald Preziosi, Rethinking Art History: Meditations on a Coy Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 111-21; and Matthew Rampley, "Iconology of the Interval: Aby Warburg's Legacy," Word and Image 17, no. 4 (2001): 303-24. The Centre Georges Pompidou published a volume of laudatory essays, Pour un temps/Erwin Panofsky (Paris: Centre Georges Pomidou, 1983). Georges Didi-Huberman discussed the assumptions and difficulties of Panofsky's theory of iconology, which delivered the entire

image to the "tyranny" of concepts, in Devant l'image (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1990), 105-68 and passim.

2. Without citing the vast literature on the history of dress and costume, I note the work of historians of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who have examined hats and particularly the bonnet rouge worn during the French Revolution: Jennifer Harris, "The Red Cap of Liberty: A Study of Dress Worn by French Revolutionary Partisans 1789-94," Eighteenth-Century Studies 14, no. 3 (1981): 283-312. Richard Wrigley has written on the subject in "Transformations of a Revolutionary Emblem: The Liberty Cap in the French Revolution," French History 11, no. 2 (1997): 131-69, and most recently, in The Politics of Appearances: Representations of Dress in Revolutionary France (New York: Berg, 2002). Valerie Mainz has argued that the Phrygian caps in Jacques-Louis David's The Intervention of the Sabine Women were allusions to the painting's political subtext, in "David's Les Sabines and the Colouring of History Painting Post-Thermidor," Interfaces




10 (Feb. 1996): 45-59. For studies of the liberty cap in Britain, see Joel Epstein, "Understanding the Cap of Liberty: Symbolic Practice and Social Conflict in Early 19th-Century England," Past and Present 122 (1989): 74-118; and David Bindman, In the Shadow of the Guillotine: Britain and the French Revolution (London: British Museum Publications, 1989).

3. Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1939), 3ff.

4. Meyer Schapiro, "Courbet and Popular Imagery," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 4 (1941): 164-91, reprinted in Schapiro, Modern Art: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries; Selected Papers (London: Chatto and Windus, 1978), 47-86; Nochlin; T. J. Clark, Image of the People (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973); James Henry Rubin, Realism and Social Vision in Courbet and Proudhon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980); and Klaus Herding, Courbet to Venture Independence, trans. John William Gabriel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991).

5. See Michael Fried, Courbet's Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), which extended the argument and analysis first begun in Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980).

6. Jacques Ranciere, L'inconscient esthitique (Paris: Galilee, 2001), 10-11. 7. Ibid., 21. His terms are "le visible et le dicible" and "la parole fait voir." 8. For a recent study on the interaction between popular language

and painting in the 16th century, see Mark A. Meadow, Pieter Bruegel the Elder's Netherlandish Proverbs and the Practice of Rhetoric (Zwolle: Waanders, 2002).

9. For a discussion of the efficacy of almanacs in addressing their minimally literate audience, see Genevieve Bolleme, Les almanachs populaires aux XVIIe et XVIIIe sikcles: Essai d'histoire sociale (Paris: Mouton, 1969), 11-15 and passim. For documentation on the popularity and frequency of reproduction of the Wandering Jew motif, see Nicole Garnier, L'imagerie populaire francaise: Gra- vures en taille-douce et en taille d'ipargne, vol. 1 (Paris: Reunion des Musees Na- tionaux, 1990), 190, 227, 228, 242, 271, 311, 357; and Cinq silcles dimageriefran- (aise, exh. cat., Musee National des Arts et Traditions Populaires, Paris, 1973.

10. See Nochlin, 213-16, 217, for the illustrations. 11. Courbet to Alfred Bruyas, Apr. 5, 1855, in Chu, 1996, 127: "La Rencon-

tre est recue avec peine. On trouve cela trop personnel et trop pretentieux." 12. Courbet to Bruyas, May 11, 1855, in Chu, 1996, 129: "Votre tableau La

Rencontre fait un effet extraordinaire. Dans Paris, on le nomme: Bonjour Monsieur Courbet et les gardiens sont deja occup6s A conduire les etrangers devant mes tableaux. Bonjour Monsieur Courbet a un succes general." Chu, 1992, 141: 'Your painting the Meeting is making an extraordinary impression. In Paris they call it Bonjour, Monsieur Courbet, and the exhibition guards are already busy taking foreigners to my paintings. Bonjour, Monsieur Courbet is a universal success."

13. Bruyas to Courbet, Aug. 30, 1855, in Courbet & Montpellier, exh. cat., Musee Fabre, Montpellier, 1985, 131: "Bonjour! M. Courbet, & leur Exposition."

14. See Chang. 15. Bruyas sent four photographic reproductions taken from his private

collection in the same letter: a preparatory drawing by Eugene Delacroix for his portrait of 1853, Tassaert's portrait of Bruyas, Tassaert's The Painter's Studio, and Dominique Papety's drawing Omnia vincit amor. The original letter and photographs are in the Fondation Doucet, Biblioth&que d'Art et d'Archeologie, Paris, carton 42 (MS amateurs). The letters have been published in Courbet & Montpellier (as in n. 13), 122-24.

16. Bruyas to Courbet, Apr. 17, 1854, in Courbet o& Montpellier (as in n. 13), 124: "Cher Courbet, Songez bien, reflechissez aux sujets que je vous envoie. C'est le po&me vrai de la peinture moderne. A.B."

17. See Courbet to Bruyas, May 3, 1854, in Chu, 1992, 113-15. 18. Edmond About, Voyage 4 travers lexposition des beaux-arts (Paris, 1855),

205: "Son admirateur et son ami, M. B., vient a sa rencontre et le salue tres-poliment. Fortunio, je veux dire M. Courbet, lui lance un coup de chapeau seigneurial et lui sourit du haut de sa barbe ...."

19. Ibid., 205: "Ni le maitre nile valet ne dessinent leur ombre sur le sol; il

n'y a d'ombre que pour M. Courbet, lui seul peut arrater les rayons du soleil." 20. Quillenbois, L'adoration de M. Courbet, imitation rialiste de l'adoration des

mages, published in L'lllustration, July 21, 1855, reproduced in Helene Tous- saint, Gustave Courbet 1819-1877, exh. cat., Arts Council of Great Britain, London, 1978, 110.

21. See Alexandre Cabanel's autograph letters to Bruyas in 1846 and 1847 at the Fondation Doucet, Ms 216, I, nos. 51-54.

22. The resistance of Bruyas's hat to identification is all the more striking in view of the abundant terms noted in French dictionaries for headwear, which suggests its importance not only in vestimental habits but also in the culture more generally as a signifier. See Paul Robert, Dictionnaire alpha- bttique et analogique de la langue franfaise (Paris: Le Robert, 1978), vol. 1, 623, which lists, for example, "bousingot, canotier, cape, feutre (chapeau de feutre ou chapeau mou), chapeau bas de forme, haute forme (ou haute de forme), gibus, mhcanique (chapeau mecanique), paille (chapeau de paille), manille, melon, panama, petase, sombrero, suroit, tromblon, tube (cf. pop. Galette, galure, galurin). Chapeau S cornes. Bicorne, tricorne. Le petit chapeau de Napoleon." Variations include chapeau galonnl d'o,; d'argent; chapeau claque; chapeau de curt, de gendarme, de mousquetaire, de quaker; chapeau breton, chinois, mexicain, and tyrolien, and the list is not exhaustive.

23. Nicole Pellegrin, "L'ltre et paraitre au XVIIe si&cle: Les apparences vestimentaires dans L'histoire comique de Francion de Charles Sorel," La France d'Ancien Rigime, ttudes r4unies en l'honneur de Pierre Goubert (Toulouse: Sociht6 de D6mographie Historique/Privat, 1984), cited by Daniel Roche, The Culture of Clothing: Dress and Fashion in the "Ancien Regime," trans. Jean Birrell (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 19.

24. Honore de Balzac, Les illusions perdues (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 286: "I1 y a une indefinissable facon de porter un chapeau: mettez le chapeau un peu trop en arri&re, vous avez l'art effronte, mettez-le trop en avant, vous avez l'art sournois; de cbt6, I'air devient cavalier; les femmes comme il faut posent leurs chapeaux comme elles veulent et ont toujours bon air."

25. Roche (as in n. 23), 34. 26. Ibid., 35. 27. See the database "Proverbe" created by the Direction des Mus6es de

France, which contains 25,000 proverbs: http://www.culture.gouv.fr/public/ mistral/proverbe_fr.

28. For more on the reversal of the classic trajectory from the French provinces to the capital in the careers of ambitious artists in the 19th century, see Ting Chang, "Bruyas, Paris and Montpellier: Artistic Center and Periph- ery," in Bonjour, Monsieur Courbet: Masterpieces from the Alfred Bruyas Collection of the Muske Fabre (Paris: Reunion des Mushes Nationaux, 2004), 45-52.

29. Chu, 1992, 104; and Chu, 1996, 98. 30. The expressions and proverbs cited below have been compiled in

French dictionaries and historical lexicons, notably, Duneton and Claval; Antoine Fureti&re, Dictionnaire universel, contenant g#niralement tous les mots francais tant vieux que modernes et les termes de toutes les sciences et des arts (The Hague, 1690; reprint, Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1970); D'Hautel, Dictionnaire du Bas-langage, ou des maniares de parler usitles parmi le peuple; ouvrage dans lequel on a r4uni les expressions proverbiales, figurkes et triviales; les sobriquets, termes ironiques etfacdtieux; les barbarismes, solecismes; et g&n&ralement les locutions basses et vicieuses que l'on doit rejeter de la bonne conversation (Paris: Leopold Collin, 1808), vol. 1, reprint (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1972), vols. 1, 2; Grand Larousse de la languefrancaise en sept volumes (Paris: Librairie Larousse, 1989); Trtsor de la langue franfaise, vol. 4; Montreynaud et al.; Dictionnaire des expressions et locutions, rev. ed. (Montreal: Le Robert, 1988); Pierre-Marie Quitard, ed., Dictionnaire ttymologique, historique et anecdotique de proverbes et des locutions proverbiales dans la

languefranCaise (Paris: P. Bertrand, 1842; reprint, Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1968); and Robert (as in n. 22). Specific references will follow.

31. Robert (as in n. 22), 522. 32. Two plays on the theme are Friedrich von Schiller, Wilhelm Tell, 1804,

translated into French as Guillaume Tell, in Oeuvres dramatiques traduites de l'allemand (Paris, 1821); and James Sheridan Knowles, William Tell (Paris, 1828).

33. Duneton and Claval, 395; and Furetiere (as in n. 30), vol. 1, n.p. 34. Sigmund Freud, "Infantile Material as a Source of Dreams," in The

Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, vol. 4 (London: Hogarth Press, 1956), 196-97.

35. Freud, "The Means of Representation in Dreams," in ibid., 336. 36. It should be noted that although Freud emphasized free association, he

would later add a section entitled "Symbolism in Dreams" in 1914 to the fourth edition of "The Interpretation of Dreams," in Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis in which hats, among other items, are given a univocal uncon- scious signification as genitals. In his 1900 essay "The Interpretation of Dreams," Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, vol. 5 (London: Hogarth Press, 1956), 355, a woman's hat in a dream is identified with a genital organ, as is a man's hat. See also the 1911 essay "A Hat as a Symbol of a Man (or of Male Genitals)," in ibid., 413-14.

37. See Rubin (as in n. 4), 14-20, for his analysis of this event and his Proudhonian interpretation of Courbet's rhetoric.

38. Chu, 1992, 115-16, for the full and much-quoted text in English; and Chu, 1996, 108, for the original.

39. For a study of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's influence on Courbet's political views in the 1850s, see Rubin (as in n. 4), 10 and passim. Neil McWilliam convincingly shows that before becoming a Proudhon devotee, Courbet in the 1840s was a Fourierist and a follower of Pierre Leroux, in "Un Enterrement & Paris: Courbet's Political Contacts in 1845," Burlington Magazine 125, no. 960 (1983): 155-57. Rancihre and Faure reprinted a highly instructive collection of speeches and texts by French workers during the revolutions, strikes, and uprisings between 1830 and 1851.

40. Ranciere and Faure, 79; and Chu, 1996, 107. 41. Chu, 1992, 115; and Chu, 1996, 107. 42. A. de Belloy, L'Assemblee Nationale 250 (Sept. 7, 1855): "M. Courbet est

un peintre habile dans une mesure ordinaire; il agit, dans ce moment, comme un homme qui, pour faire effet dans un salon, y arriverait avec un habit a I'envers... "

43. Chu, 1992, 115. In the original (Chu, 1996, 107), it reads, 'J'ai brill mes vaisseaux. J'ai rompu en visiere avec la societ&. J'ai insult& tous ceux qui me servaient maladroitement. Et me voici seul en face de cette sociit&. II faut vaincre ou mourir."

44. See Chang; and idem, "Alfred Bruyas: The Mythology and Practice of Art Collecting and Patronage in Nineteenth-Century France," Ph.D. diss., University of Sussex, 1996, chap. 4.

45. T. J. Clark (as in n. 4), 114. 46. Chu, 1996, 114.




47. Nochlin, 213-16. 48. For a lucid analysis of the gains and losses of the worker revolutions, see

Rancihre and Faure, 26 and passim. 49. Duneton and Claval, 530. 50. See Savinien Lapointe's full text addressed to Victor Hugo regarding

the latter's proposal to create prizes to incite "the love of work, morality among workers [1'amour du travail, la moralitM chez les ouvriers]" in Rancihre and Faure, 259-67.

51. Ibid., 264-65. 52. Ibid., 265-66: "Toutefois je ne vous cache pas que je me d6fie un peu

de ces endosseurs de vestes, j'ai bien peur que ce ne soit li qu'un moyen adroit de sauver les privilhges attach6s a l'aristocratie nouvelle. Oui, certaines gens descendent en sabots, dans les ateliers, par la crainte qu'ils ont de voir le peuple monter chez eux, mhme en escarpins."

53. In Duneton and Claval, 427, the expression is dated to the beginning of the 19th century. The same dictionary, 427, refers to a still earlier expression, "mettre la main au chapeau," literally, to put one's hand on or to touch one's hat as a salutation, noted in Furetihre (as in n. 30) in the late 17th century.

54. Alfred Bruyas, quoted in G6rard de LUotoing, "La Collection Bruyas, au Mus6e Fabre de Montpellier," master's thesis, Ecole du Louvre, 1979, 224, "Voila enfin l'art libre. Ce tableau m'appartient," as originally reported by Champfleury.

55. The caricature by Cham is reproduced in Toussaint (as in n. 20), 118. 56. The Bathers was to provide another link. In 1855 Courbet wrote to

Bruyas, "A young man came to see me, sent by you. He wants a painting in the style of the Bathers. If you know him, send me his address, he forgot to leave it with me." Chu, 1992, 139.

57. Grand Larousse (as in n. 30), 375, indicates "Barbe, Vx. Faire la barbe h quelqu'un, se montrer plus fort que lui

... ." meaning to show oneself to be

stronger than another, to upstage another. Trtsor de la langue francaise, 165, explains that "faire barbe de paille" means to deceive.

58. Grand Larousse (as in n. 30), 375, explains "A la barbe de quelqu'un" as to flout or defy someone openly. "Rire dans sa barbe," according to ibid., is to dissimulate or hide a malicious satisfaction at the expense of another. For an

early-18th-century example, see Saint-Simon, Mtmoires du duc de Saint-Simon, vol. 4 (Paris: Hachette, 1873), 406: "... et Chamillart, qui jusque-la s'6toit content6 de rire dans sa barbe

... ."

59. Trisor de la languefranfaise, 166, finds le barbe slang for a pimp or brothel keeper and refers to Charles Virmaitre, Dictionnaire d'argotfin-de-sikcle (Paris: A. Charles, 1894), 25.

60. Montreynaud et al., 36, explains "du c6t6 de la barbe est la toute- puissance," the all-powerful resides on the side of the male and notes Mo- lihre's use of the proverb in Ecole des femmes, 3.2.

61. Montreynaud et al., 36, cites a much older expression, "Barbe rousse, noir de chevelure, est reput6 faux par nature" (Meurier, 1568), literally, a man with a red beard and black hair is deceitful by nature.

62. Duneton and Claval, 267. Montreynaud et al., 36, dates the expression "en la grande barbe ne git pas le savoir," knowledge does not reside in a long beard, to the 18th century.

63. Confais, "ouvrier peintre" in the 1848 Organisation du Travail, quoted in Rancihre and Faure, 328: "Voyez si la forme mhme qu'on emploie pour amener les ouvriers au travail n'est pas humiliante et honteuse: tous les

peintres dont l'activit6 est sans emploi vont s'exposer et se morfondre sur une place publique appel6e: le coin; la, ils subissent toutes les fantaisies d'un

entrepreneur ou toutes les angoisses de la misere: les voici courb6s sous le

joug du hasard et du caprice; souvent trois jours d'occupation sont suivis d'une quinzaine de ch6mage complet; et, A chaque corv6e nouvelle, nouveau maitre, nouvelles pr6tentions, nouvelles tyrannies!!!"

64. Bertall, "Le Salon d6peint et dessin6 par Bertall," Lejournal pour Rire, no. 203 (Aug. 18, 1855): 4: "La Rencontre par Courbet, le plus courb6 des trois n'est pas celui qu'on pense."

65. See Chu, 1996, 82, in which Courbet gives his much-quoted description of The Stone Breakers: "LA est un vieillard de soixante-et-dix ans, courbh sur son travail, la masse en l'air, les chairs hkl6es par le soleil, sa thte A l'ombre d'un

chapeau de paille. ..." 66. Duneton and Claval, 854, dates the expression "balancer sa canne," to

toss one's cane, from 1872 to the end of the 19th century and explains its

meaning as to exceed one's limits, to soar, to break one's promise [of marriage]: "voler, se mettre a voler, rompre son ban." On 877, it explains the

expression of about 1867, "casser sa canne," to break one's walking stick:

"rompre son ban, quand on est sous la surveillance de lajustice; s'en aller. A

partir du sens de casser sa canne, s'en aller, il s'est produit une assimilation de canne iA ban (residence forcee): Stamir, 1867, 'Malheur A lui qui a cass6 sa canne.' " In other words, to break one's walking stick is to disobey prohibition when under surveillance from the law; to leave. An assimilation of meaning occurred between the expressions "breaking the stick" and "staff of prohibition," meaning a forced residence: Stamir, 1867, "Grief to he who breaks his

walking stick." 67. Ibid., 877, "Etre en canne," 1872, meaning "habiter, aprhs avoir subi sa

peine, une localite determinee par l'autorite." "To be in cane" is to live at a location designated by the authorities after the completion of the punishment.

68. Ibid., 890, "Offrir une canne, ch6mer"; 893, "Donner sa canne, de 1866, renvoyer un employe" To offer a walking stick, to give a walking stick in 1866 was to dismiss an employee.

69. Ibid., 110, "Rendre sa canne au ministre, mourir," to return the cane to the minister, to die.

70. Courbet to Bruyas, Oct. 1853, in Chu, 1996, 109: "Sacrifiez tout au retablissement de votre sant&. Reposez-vous et ne vous donnez aucune peine; mhme en parole...."

71. See Chang; and Chang (as in n. 44), for more on the patron's ambitions for The Meeting.

72. I borrow the term from the classic work on symbolic resistance by Richard Terdiman, Discourse/Counter-discourse: The Theory and Practice of Sym- bolic Resistance in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985).

73. Courbet to his sister, mid-Sept. 1854, in Chu, 1992, 125, and Chu, 1996, 116.

74. Sigmund Freud, "Lecture XXIX, Revision of the Theory of Dreams," in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, vol. 22 (London: Ho-

garth Press, 1964), 7-31, esp. 20. 75. Quitard (as in n. 30), 206. 76. Hats appear in a large number of Courbet's paintings, including Portrait

of Regis Courbet, ca. 1840; The Draughts Players, 1844; Self-Portrait with Black Dog, 1844; After Dinner at Omans, 1848-49; The Stone Breakers, 1849; A Burial at Ornans, 1849; The Peasants of Flagey Returning from a Fair, 1850; Portrait of Adolphe Marlet, 1851; The Homecoming, ca. 1854; Portrait of Proudhon, 1853; The Sea at Palavas, 1854, The Charity of a Beggar, 1867-68; and Self-Portrait at

Sainte-Pdlagie, 1873-74.



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Hats and Hierarchy in Gustave Courbet's \"The Meeting

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