Charles Suisse

On the Ile de la Cite in Paris there was a drawing studio with no teacher in it, only a live model and a stove, run by a former artist's model named Suisse. Anyone could pay a small fee and work from the figure, with no lessons and no corrections. Courbet drew there as a young man in the 1840s, and after him so did Manet, Monet, Pissarro and Cezanne. In 1861, by then established and notorious as the leader of Realism, he painted the old man himself: white hair swept back, the black coat of a respectable Parisian, spectacles slipped low, the eyes still quick. He gives the keeper of that plain room the steady, unflattering attention he gave his stonebreakers and hunters.