The Return from the Meeting

The Return from the Meeting (1863), held at the Kunstmuseum Basel, was one of Courbet's most explicitly anticletical works and was rejected from the Salon — notably not by the official jury but reportedly purchased by a private collector who then destroyed it, considering it blasphemous. The painting showed a group of drunken priests stumbling home after a meeting, satirizing the Catholic clergy with the same social directness Courbet applied to bourgeois society and official culture. The subject drew on the tradition of anticlerical satire with roots in Dutch and Flemish genre painting, but Courbet's Realist treatment — depicting recognizable clerical types with the physicality of actual observation rather than caricature — gave it contemporary bite. The Basel acquisition of the work in the nineteenth century demonstrates that institutionally adventurous collecting existed alongside official disapproval. Courbet's anticlerical stance was consistent with his philosophical materialism and his alignment with Proudhon's secular republican thought.

The figures are rendered with Courbet's characteristic physical insistence — the weight of cloth, the unsteadiness of posture, the reddened faces of men who have been drinking — using the dense impasto that makes his figure paintings feel bodily present. The landscape setting behind the priests is handled with less attention than the figures.