No biographer could ask for a more colorful or difficult subject than the painter and revolutionary Gustave Courbet. One of the fathers of Realism, a style he created with his huge canvases of his birthplace in Ornans (After Dinner at Ornans, 1949; Funeral at Ornans, 1850, and The Stonebreakers, 1850), Courbet chose his subjects from ordinary life and portrayed them with the same monumental dignity as the great men of history. A man with big appetites for life, women, and politics, he frequently found himself at odds with French authorities, especially during the...