The most substantial exhibition devoted to Gustave Courbet’s paintings since the Brooklyn Museum of Art’s Courbet Reconsidered a decade ago was presented at the Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne last winter from November through March. It then traveled to the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, where it closed on May 30. Titled Courbet: Artiste et Promoteur de Son Oeuvre,it was organized by Lausanne’s director, Jürg Zutter, in collaboration with the noted Courbet scholar Petra ten-Doesschate Chu. The well-illustrated catalogue contains valuable essays by Patricia Mainardi and Michael Clarke as well as by the two organizers. Although somewhat difficult to use because it lacks an index of works, the catalogue is an important and welcome addition to the Courbet literature. The exhibition focused on the latter half-actually closer to two thirds-of the artist’s career, from the mid-1850s through to the artist’s death in 1877 at the age of 58. To consider the year 1855, with its great “summa” painting, The Studio of the Painter,and its innovative Pavillon du Réalisme as a dividing point in Courbet’s career is not an unusual view of the artist’s work. The earlier period, which saw him building up in the later 1840s to the climactic moment of...