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“Itraveled through tradition,” said Courbet, “as a good swimmer would cross a river; the academicians all drowned in it.”1 Although taunting officialdom with this quip, the painter at the same time revealed a full awareness of his own debt to the art of the past. It is well known that Courbet studied Renaissance and Baroque painting of the Northern countries, Italy, and Spain, and that he did not hesitate to use figures and compositions that appealed to him. As late as 1853, for example, he drew heavily upon a work by Guido Reni for his painting Wrestlers.2 It was not in this practice that he differed from academicians, but in the choice and variety of his sources and in his adaptation of borrowed motifs to common scenes from daily life. Courbet profited from the rediscovery of the Le Nain brothers, the straightforward symbolism of children's drawings and popular prints, and the mechanical realism of the still novel photography.3 Almost any form of visual representation would seem to have served as a stimulus to his own conceptions.
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