Gustave Courbet was born in 1819 in Ornans, a rural French village along the border with Switzerland, into a family rising into the bourgeois class of land and business owners. His father pressed him to become an attorney, a family ambition for firstborn sons of the French middle class during the 19th century. Gustave refused (as later Edward Degas, Paul Cezanne and Henri Matisse, thank heaven, refused their fathers).