Madame Frederic Breyer

Courbet painted this in Brussels in 1858. Three years earlier, when the Paris world's fair turned down his largest canvases, he had put up his own shed beside it and called the show Realism, and by 1858 he was working the market outside France, in Belgium and then Germany, where his big pictures of country people found buyers faster than they did at home. This was a betrothal portrait, ordered by the sitter's fiancé, a doctor from Germany who moved in the same progressive political circles as the painter. Shown in Antwerp that summer, it was praised for a woman nobody called beautiful, described instead as strong-willed and full of spirit. The picture stayed in her family until 1907. For most of the 20th century she was catalogued as Madame de Brayer, a Polish exile. The museum now gives her name as Fanny Hélène Van Bruyssel, who lived from 1830 to 1894.