Gustave Claude Étienne COURTOIS, born May 18, 1852 in Pusey (Haute-Saône) and died in 1923 in Paris, was a French painter. Gustave COURTOIS is the son of Étienne COURTOIS , a charcuterie boy, and Jeanne Claude JOBARD, a laundress. His mother is totally devoted to him. His interest in art comes to him very young, when he is studying in the high school of Vesoul, and is noticed by his professor of drawing Victor JEANNENEY. It was then that he entered the Municipal School of Drawing of Vesoul. His drawings are presented to Jean-Léon GEROME who advises him in 1869 to enter the School of Fine Arts in Paris. Throughout his life Gustave COURTOIS is a close friend of his classmate Pascal DAGNAN-BOUVERET, with whom he shares a studio in Neuilly-sur-Seine from the 1880s. He teaches painting at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and at the Académie Colarossi in Paris where, among others, Georges d'ESPAGNAT and Maurice PRENDERGAST are studying. Robert FERNIER and Robert BOUROULT from the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris were also his students. Refugee in Ticino with his lover the painter Carl Ernst von STETTEN throughout the duration of the First World War, he will maintain a very close correspondence with Robert FERNIER while he was at the front. He is the author of portraits, genre scenes, religious or mythological scenes often populated by voluptuous naked men. Gustave COURTOIS also exhibited at the National Society of Fine Arts in 1892. His works are preserved, among others, at the museums of Dijon, Besançon, Marseilles, Bordeaux, Pontarlier, the Orsay Museum in Paris and the Town Hall of Baulmes.