Peasant Girl with a Scarf

Around 1849 France was barely a year past the revolution of 1848, and in Franche-Comté, Courbet's home region in the east, farm work was being changed by new machines. Courbet was spending much of his time painting the people of the country around his hometown, Ornans, and this young woman in a checked kerchief most likely came from that world.

She is pressed right up to the front of the picture, chin on her hand, cheeks flushed from sun or work, and she looms much larger than the wooded landscape behind her. The Norton Simon Museum points out that Parisian viewers of the day found a provincial subject like this, and that awkward fit between figure and landscape, radical in politics as well as in painting. Courbet said it himself: “Realism is essentially democratic.”

In French the picture is called Paysanne au madras, after her cotton headscarf. It passed through a Swiss collection to John Dorrance, heir to the Campbell Soup company, and came to Pasadena in 1989, the year his collection was sold at auction.