Die Nachdenkliche

By 1864 Courbet was the most talked-about painter in France, the man who had built his own pavilion to show pictures the official Salon would not, insisting that a painter should show only what he could actually see. This is one of his quieter efforts from that year, a single woman turned inward, caught in a moment of thought rather than in any action a story could hang on. He gives her no allegory and no anecdote, just a mood held in the tilt of the head and the lowered eyes. The painting reached the museum at Douai through a local collector's bequest, arriving there among the Veroneses and Rubenses he had gathered over a lifetime.