| This dissertation proposes that Courbet used exhibitions to construct a visual history of his art, life, and career. His displays often parallel an autobiographer's invention of a subjective story masked as truth. Thus, by exhibiting select landscapes, historical genre paintings, and portraits, Courbet constructed and maintained an image that supported his personal narrative.;Chapter 1 examines the early development of Courbet's self-image. The painter's perception of himself grew out of romantic conceptions of the artist, especially that of the artist as persecuted outsider.;Chapter 2 focuses on Courbet's first submissions to the Salons of the 1840s. During this period, he searched for ways to meet the jury's criteria and to create cutting-edge art. Ultimately, the open Salon of 1848 offered him the opportunity to group paintings together and promote his own version of his history to the public.;Like autobiography, Courbet's exhibitions document a transformation. Chapter 3 proposes how his Salon entries reinforced his self-constructed persona by recording his journey from romantic to Realist.;At mid-career, the work having the greatest relevance to Courbet's historical presentation was The Studio of the Painter, a Real Allegory Determining a Phase of Seven Years of my Artistic Life, created specifically for the Universal Exposition of 1855. Chapter 4 examines the relationship of the Studio to the other paintings submitted to the Exposition jury. I contend that these fourteen paintings consolidated a specific view of Courbet's life and career.;The rejection of the Studio and two other paintings led Courbet to plan his Pavilion of Realism. The Pavilion, which made it possible for him to exhibit additional paintings in 1855, is analyzed in Chapter 5. The contents of this show point to a selective narrative of Courbet's career—that of a painter who has shed his romantic, literary origins to usher in a new artistic age—that of Realism.;At his second independent retrospective of 1867—the topic of Chapter 6—Courbet's exhibition strategy emerged as a fully developed concept. This display, with its catalogue, reads as autobiographical narrative or fictionalized history, asserting Courbet's persistent self-construction as persecuted outsider. |
