"Great Artists" is a unique series of magazines covering the history of world painting and presenting famous artists, their lives, creative development and the most famous works. Each issue of the collection is dedicated to one of the outstanding painters. On thirty-two pages of each magazine, the life and creative development of a particular artist is presented and his contribution to world painting is analyzed. At the end of the issue there is a list of museums that house paintings by this master.

Gustave Courbet was born in France in 1819. His life coincided with extremely important events in French history. He witnessed the July Revolution of 1830, the February Revolution of 1848, the Second Republic, the Second Empire, the Paris Commune and the Third Republic. But even despite his own republican convictions, Courbet never had clearly defined predilections for any political system, remaining faithful only to the “discipline of freedom.”