M. Nodler, the Elder at Trouville

In the autumn of 1865 Courbet was working in Trouville, the Normandy seaside resort, and wealthy summer visitors kept asking him for portraits. On 16 September he wrote to Urbain Cuenot, a friend from his home town of Ornans, that he had finished a portrait of Monsieur Nodler's son and was about to paint the brother and the father as well. This is the elder brother, seated at his ease on a chair, with a strip of beach and a flat grey sea behind him and a cane or riding crop in his hand. In the lower left corner the date reads 66, a year late. Courbet had a habit of giving recent canvases a fresher date before he exhibited them, and the Nodler portraits went into the one-man show he staged at the Pavillon de l'Alma in Paris in 1867. The younger brother's portrait is in the Museum of Fine Arts in Springfield, Massachusetts, a short drive down the Connecticut River from Northampton.