Bouquet of Asters

Across the top-left corner Courbet wrote a short dedication: to my friend Baudelaire. He meant Charles Baudelaire, the poet, whom he had known since the 1840s around the Paris cafes. Two years earlier, in 1857, Baudelaire's book Les Fleurs du mal, Flowers of Evil, had been taken to court and fined for offending public morals, and six of its poems were banned. Handing that friend a canvas of actual flowers in 1859 carried a small, knowing joke. The bouquet itself is modest, a loose cluster of pale asters against a dark ground, worked quickly with a full brush. Courbet had already painted Baudelaire once before, reading in the corner of his enormous Painter's Studio of 1855. Here the poet is present only in the words of the dedication.