Alphonse Promayet (1822–1872)

In the winter of 1854 Courbet was racing to finish The Painter's Studio, a canvas almost six metres wide that he meant to show in Paris the following year, and he wanted his friends in it. For several of them he worked from portraits he had already painted, borrowing the pictures back from the sitters. One was Alphonse Promayet, a violinist who had been his childhood friend and schoolmate and who also stands among the mourners in A Burial at Ornans. Courbet told the critic Champfleury in a letter that he was putting Promayet in "with his violin under his arm, as he is in the portrait he sends me." This is that portrait, painted in 1851. The bearded musician looks down and away from us, and at the lower left you can just make out the scroll of his violin, which the Met's catalogue says was repainted sometime between 1919 and 1929.