Beauty, like truth, is relative to the time when one lives and to the individual who can grasp it. The expression of beauty is in direct ratio to the power of conception the artist has acquired.

Courbet links aesthetics to historical circumstance and individual perception: what counts as “beauty” is not fixed but conditioned by the era and by the viewer’s capacity to apprehend it. This aligns with his Realist stance against timeless academic ideals, insisting that art should engage the lived realities of its moment. The second sentence shifts from reception to production: an artwork’s beauty depends on the artist’s “power of conception”—their imaginative and intellectual grasp of the world—rather than on adherence to inherited formulas. Beauty, in this view, is achieved through perceptive understanding and contemporary relevance, not through copying canonical models.