READINGS OF GUSTAVE COURBET MARK EDWIN SOUNESS A ...

Abstract: A Study in Positivism and Physiology: Readings of Gustave Courbet
This thesis explores ways in which the mid-nineteenth-century current of positivist
thought impacted upon the work of the French artist Gustave Courbet (1819-1877). Guided
by certain methodological imperatives set out in the theories of Hayden White and
Dominick LaCapra – in particular LaCapra’s identification of the need for historical
practice to avoid reductive interpretation of data and to recognise the formulation of
concepts through intersecting domains of knowledge and the specificity of their articulation
in different primary sources – this thesis focuses upon interpretations of Courbet’s work
formulated between 1848 and 1878, examines ideas developed within the intersecting
domains of positivism and medical science, and highlights the deployment of these ideas
for political leverage across the entire political spectrum. The thesis discovers ways in
which positivist interpreters of Courbet’s work, including the artist himself, sought to
criticise and resolve the social and political problems of the time by drawing upon theories
designed to achieve social harmony through scientific understanding of human nature and
its evolution. The thesis demonstrates that numerous social commentators referred to the
images of people and social conditions in Courbet’s paintings to express positivist views
about social decay, the enduring human potential to reform such decay, and an inevitable
achievement of social harmony. I show that positivists interpreted the artist’s work with
recourse to disciplines such as biology, physiology and physiognomy, as well as concepts
such as ‘the physical and the moral,’ according to which the various physical, mental,
emotional and moral dimensions of the human constitution were closely interconnected,
evident in physical appearance, and crucially influenced by the changing environmental
conditions impacting upon them, including society. I also show that, according to such
prescriptions, the physical appearance of ordinary contemporary people represented in
Courbet’s paintings indicated their physical and moral state and by extension the social
conditions forming this state. Such physiognomical principles were often associated with
caricature and portraiture to advance the critical and affective nature of Courbet’s paintings,
which were seen as aesthetic stimulants in an evolutionary process of social reform. As the
project shows, positivists thought that Courbet’s paintings expressed certain ideal notions
of equality and materiality that served the political, ideological and often anti-religious
interests of the writers concerned; in these views, all humans fostered the same inherent
physiological desire for altruistic existence and shared equal status with animals and
organisms as physiological beings conceived and sustained within biological nature.
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