Die Almosen eines Bettlers in Ornans

By 1868 Gustave Courbet had made his name painting the plain people of Ornans, his hometown in eastern France, at a scale usually reserved for kings and saints. He sent this to the Paris Salon that year hoping to recover from a costly private exhibition that had flopped. It shows a gaunt, ragged old beggar stopping on the road to hand a coin to a poor woman's small son, while she crouches with her baby in the dust. The paint is coarse, the poverty unsoftened. Visitors recoiled, and even Courbet's friends were troubled that a filthy vagrant had been given the dignity of a huge canvas. It was among the last big pictures he painted at Ornans before politics and exile pulled him away.