The Man Made Mad with Fear

Around 1844 Courbet was in his mid-twenties, working in Paris, and by his own letters home he was torn between self-doubt and enormous ambition. French and German Romantic writers of the time liked to tie genius to madness, and here he casts himself in that role. He stands on the edge of a cliff in a mountain landscape, his left hand clutching his head and his right reaching straight out towards us, as if feeling for something to hold. In the same years he painted himself as The Desperate Man, staring out with both hands in his hair. Look at the lower half of this canvas. The rock and the drop beneath him were never finished, and pale patches of the underlayer show through the brushwork. The picture came to the National Museum in Oslo in 1947 as a bequest from a private couple.