The artist Courbet was from France. He studied the Baroque masters in the Louvre Museum and was primarily self-taught. His themes, like those in the massive group painting The Artist's Studio and the picture The Stone Breakers, were frequently perceived as startling.

The paintings Courbet created in the late 1840s and early 1850s are what originally attracted attention to him. They defied convention by portraying imperfect peasants and workers, frequently on a huge scale usually reserved for works of art expressing religious or historical subjects. The majority of Courbet's later works, which included landscapes, seascapes,nature based , hunting scenes, nude figures, and still lifes, had fewer blatantly political themes.

Courbet visited the Netherlands in 1846 and adopted Rembrandt and Hals' broad painting style, including their liberal use of paint and palette knives to create dramatic chiaroscuro results in his own paintings. He was inspired by the Dutch paintings he saw in Parisian galleries.

One of the most intriguing feminine paintings by Courbet is The Beautiful Irish Girl. Joanna Heffernan served as the model.

Her lovely thick Titian-red hair, the brilliance of her light, creamy skin, the brightness of the chemise with its exquisite lace trim, and other features are all enhanced by the neutral, greenish background. The brushwork creates a tactile, incredibly sensual, and wildly diversified painterly framework all around

through to Whistler's contacts, giving rise to this painting and permanently imprinting her bush on our retinas. Several of Courbet's most well-known works were the consequence of their brief relationship.

Specifically in the painting we see some important things. 

The woman fills the entire canvas, with the bulk of her upper torso in the central portion and her shoulders in the foreground, all against a consistent deep green backdrop.

The more minute aspects of the cheeks are rendered realistically, and the paint is applied with great care to add detail.
The woman’s expression also seems to be very odd, and concentrated. 

The red/auburn color of the hair is used in conjunction with light to contrast and emphasize against the dark background.

Natural hues are employed throughout, but black and brown are also used to cast shadows inside the curls of the hair.

The relevance of the Dutch realists of the 17th century, who established the household folk setting, the modern portrait, and the still life as major and even dramatic artistic matters, left an impression on Courbet. Their example supported Courbet's critique of the prior era of French Romantics, who emphasized heroic tales or epic battles between man and nature.

One of the four copies the artist made of this particular picture was retained by him until it was eventually donated to the National museum in Stockholm since it was so highly received. Until 2001, when investigation revealed that dishonest American sugar tycoon Henry Osborne Havemeyer's wife Louisine had given the genuine to the Met upon her death in 1929, it may have been his ownership of the piece that led people to assume it to be the original.





BIBLIOGRAPHY

Jo, the beautiful irish girl - Gustave Courbet - Google Arts & Culture (no date) Google. Google. Available at: https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/jo-the-beautiful-irish-girl-gustave-courbet/6wGkbiqb-8Vy9A?hl=en (Accessed: November  20, 2022). 

Jo, la belle irlandaise by Gustave Courbet (2021) Artvee. Available at: https://artvee.com/dl/jo-la-belle-irlandaise/ (Accessed: November 21, 2022).