Partnership in paint

In 1853 Alfred Bruyas, the son of a banker who used the family fortune to collect art, visited the annual salon in Paris, where the talk of the show was a large painting by Gustave Courbet called “The Bathers.” The picture depicts a dark forest glade where a very large woman is stepping out of a shallow pool, her more than ample behind not quite covered by a towel. Critics applauded the young artist’s bravura painting but not its content. Napoleon III allegedly whacked the canvas with his riding crop. And after admiring the Percheron horses pictured in another painting the Empress Eugenie asked: “Is she a Percheron too?”

“Is ugliness the only truth?” the writer Theophile Gautier added. “ ... This unfortunate canvas is proof of a great talent gone astray.”

Bruyas purchased the painting, as well as another work from Courbet. “Here at last is free art,” he raved.

The two became quick friends, and Bruyas urged Courbet to visit him in his hometown of Montpellier in southern France. The artist arrived the following year and stayed several months, painting another large seminal canvas called “The Meeting,” which shows Courbet and Bruyas encountering each other on a country road. Bruyas eventually came to own a dozen important Courbets, which he donated along with the rest of his collection to the Musee Fabre in Montpellier.

When the Fabre closed for a renovation, the museum sent the Bruyas collection to tour the U.S. The show is on display at San Francisco’s Legion of Honor, its last stop, through April 3.

Called “Bonjour, Monsieur Courbet!” -- another name for the painting of Bruyas and Courbet meeting -- the exhibition features nearly 70 works of art that Bruyas collected from his contemporaries. There’s a fine selection of animal sculptures and watercolors from Antoine-Louis Barye, a marvelous gallery of paintings and drawings by Eugene Delacroix and some interesting works by forgotten painters such as Alexandre Cabanel.

But the indisputable star is Courbet -- represented by nine paintings -- whose long, somewhat stormy relationship with Bruyas is the emotional heart of the exhibition.

Bruyas was born in 1821 in Montpellier, where he studied painting before putting away his brushes in favor of collecting. He also commissioned many paintings, especially of himself. Bruyas’ image -- sad eyes, thick red hair and beard -- is everywhere in the exhibition. An early painting by Auguste Barthelemy Glaize shows Bruyas as a youthful dandy in an Italian landscape, wearing a burnoose in what almost looks like a parody of a Titian doge power pose. In Octave Tassaert’s portrait, Bruyas sits between a painter and his canvas and seems to be lecturing the artist.

But it wasn’t until Bruyas posed for Delacroix in 1853 that a painter really managed to capture the melancholy collector. Delacroix’s Bruyas perches on a regal chair, decked out in the trappings of wealth (rings, brooches, chains) but his body is submerged in shadows, his face gaunt, eyes searching the floor, a bejeweled hand clutching a handkerchief -- a reminder of the tuberculosis that blighted his health.

That same year Bruyas met Courbet, who was two years older. Bruyas snapped up several important paintings, including Courbet’s “Man With Pipe,” a dark, brooding self-portrait in which the artist is insolence personified. “It is not only my portrait but yours as well,” Courbet wrote to Bruyas.

The painter and the patron viewed their relationship as a partnership, fueled by a shared affinity for radical politics and a sense of the redemptive potential of art. “Come, then, please, leave everything!” Bruyas wrote to Courbet, inviting him to Montpellier. “

“I’m in a hurry to leave,” the painter replied, “ ... for I’m looking forward to the journey, to seeing you, and to the work we will do together.”

Before long, Courbet was painting Bruyas, even wearing his clothes, as in “Self-Portrait With a Striped Collar,” in which the artist seems to have raided the closet where Bruyas kept the coat worn in “The Meeting.”

To Bruyas nothing seemed to sum up his collaboration with Courbet better than “The Meeting,” which was painted during the artist’s long stay in Montpellier. The canvas shows Bruyas and a servant greeting Courbet (who shoulders a rucksack of painting supplies) against the bright backdrop of a Languedoc landscape. The servant bows his head; Bruyas doffs his hat. Courbet, whose figure looms largest in the painting, nods disdainfully, his stiff beard thrust at his benefactor like a dagger.

In 1855 Bruyas lent the painting to the Exposition Universelle in Paris, where Courbet’s egoism aroused the ire of critics. “There is a shadow only for Monsieur Courbet,” observed Edmond About, “for he alone can block the rays of the sun.” Other critics lampooned the work, one drawing a cartoon of Bruyas on his knees before the painter. Jules-Francois-Felix Husson (known as Champfleury) later published a satiric short story making fun of a self-important art collector with a tendency to commission portraits of himself (“the Narcissus of a civilization that has allowed man to admire his own reflection in a canvas instead of in the limpid water of a fountain”).

Bruyas was devastated by the attacks. He went almost a decade without talking to Courbet. Eventually he did buy more works from the artist, but the relationship retained none of its earlier warmth. Bruyas also had to contend with poor health and a troublesome family, which wanted to have him declared incompetent so he would stop wasting the family fortune on paintings. His passion for adventurous art waned. A poor artist named Claude Monet desperately wanted to sell Bruyas some paintings, but the collector couldn’t be bothered to show up for a meeting with the painter’s friend Frederic Bazille.

In 1868 Bruyas donated the first part of his collection to the Fabre and became the museum’s curator. Even after all the criticism, he still held his affection for “The Meeting,” hanging the painting in the center of the first gallery. Bruyas died in 1877, Courbet less than a year later.

Visiting the Fabre a few years after both men had died, painter Paul Signac considered the museum one of the five greatest artistic revelations he had ever experienced. “As soon as one enters the room in the back that hold the Bruyas collection, one feels that little shiver caused by beautiful things,” he wrote. “The Courbets here are certainly the most splendid works by the painter.”

Maybe the partnership persisted after all.