Study of a Nude Man

Gustave Courbet was a French painter who led the Realism movement in 19th-century French painting. Committed to painting only what he could see, he rejected academic convention and the Romanticism of the previous generation of visual artists. His independence set an important example to later artists, such as the Impressionists and the Cubists. It all gave him an opinion of a leading scandalmonger in the art world. But before all that happened, Courbet was studying art like everyone in his epoch. In a very traditional way. One of the parts of the student's curriculum then was painting nudes, to learn how to paint the human body.

This training exercise is thought to have been painted by the young Courbet shortly after his arrival in Paris in 1839, when he studied for several months with baron Charles de Steuben (1788–1856) and then at the Académie Suisse. In an era when themes drawn from antiquity and the Bible stood at the head of an established hierarchy of subjects, the successful rendering of the unclothed male body was a benchmark of an artist’s formation. Few such works from Courbet’s earliest years survive, and the origins of this painting remain obscure.

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P.S. See the most controversial nudes ever painted by Courbet! Spoiler: They are all female nudes, but does it surprise you?  :/