Portrait of a Man

In 1851 Courbet was the most argued-over painter in France. He had just shown enormous canvases of ordinary country people, a village burial, roadmen breaking stone, painted life-size and without a trace of flattery, and critics were furious that such plain folk should fill a frame once reserved for gods and generals. This small portrait belongs to those same years. A man in dark clothes turns three-quarters toward us out of a near-black ground, solid and unidealised, studied with the same level attention Courbet gave to everyone he painted. Who he was has not come down to us.