Portrait of a Girl from Salins

Salins-les-Bains, up in the Jura, was where Courbet went to see Max Buchon, the poet he had known since their schooldays in Besançon. Buchon fled to Switzerland after Louis-Napoléon's coup of December 1851 and was allowed home in 1856, and from then on Courbet was often in the town, painting the people he met there. The girl in this portrait is one of them, and nobody wrote down her name. What the record does keep is where the picture went. It belonged to Jean-Paul Mazaroz, a Jura cabinetmaker working in Paris who met Courbet at an exhibition in Besançon in 1860 and ended up owning some forty of his canvases. At the Gérard sale at the Hôtel Drouot in February 1896 it fetched 165 francs. In 1998, after two seasons at auction in New York, the Friends of Gustave Courbet bought it back for the museum in Ornans.