Workshop of Gustave Courbet

The name on this entry belongs to no single painter. The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston uses it for pictures that left Gustave Courbet's studio with his signature on them, but which the museum believes were painted wholly or partly by the men working for him.

Courbet relied on that help from the late 1860s on. His chief assistant was Cherubino Pata, a painter from Sonogno, a village in the Italian-speaking Swiss canton of Ticino, who worked beside him from about 1868 until Courbet's death in 1877. Another helper, the young Marcel Ordinaire, was the son of a friend from Courbet's home region in eastern France. The studio turned out the subjects buyers asked for most, the valleys around Ornans, snow scenes and the sea. Courbet sometimes let Pata lay out a composition, then went over it himself and signed it.

The arrangement mattered most in his last years, when he lived in exile in Switzerland under a crushing debt to the French state. Pata followed him there and lodged with him for months. Today the Institut Gustave Courbet in Ornans accepts some of these pictures as Courbet working in collaboration with Pata.