Head of Baby (Tête d'enfant)

By 1865 Gustave Courbet was the most argued-about painter in France, the man who had built Realism out of large canvases of stonebreakers and village funerals and dared the official Salon to take them seriously. This little panel is the quieter side of that same career. Barely larger than a sheet of paper, it shows only the head of a small child, painted rapidly and close up, with none of the public argument attached to his big pictures. Courbet kept up a steady output of intimate portraits and small studies like this one all through those years. It hangs now in the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, among the crowded walls of French painting that Albert Barnes assembled.