Focus on this artwork and explore the abstract.
The Happy Lovers is a title given to a c. 1844 painting by the French artist Gustave Courbet, now in the musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon. One of its earlier titles when exhibited in 1855 at the Pavillon Courbet in Paris was The Waltz. It was sold in the Courbet sale of 1881 and bought by M. Hard and resold to M. Brame, before entering the collection of the musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon in 1892. The engraver Félix Bracquemond, a friend of the painter, reproduced the work as an etching.
This was the prototype for a second version produced around the same time, under the title The Lovers in the Countryside – Sentiments of youth, which was given to the Petit Palais in Paris in 1909 by Juliette Courbet. Both are oil paintings on canvas and show the artist and a woman in profile.
Gustave Courbet Petit Palais Félix Bracquemond etching musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon