Portrait of a Man

1849 was the year Gustave Courbet stopped being a promising young painter and became a problem for the French art establishment. That autumn his After Dinner at Ornans took a medal at the Salon, which freed him from ever facing the jury again, and he went back to his home village to begin the huge, plain-spoken canvases, a country funeral and two roadmenders breaking stones, that would soon launch what he called Realism. This modest portrait dates from the same moment. We know almost nothing about its subject. His name went unrecorded, so the collection simply calls it Portrait of a Man, an ordinary person given no grand setting and no flattery, the kind of unidealised likeness Courbet was starting to build his name on. He signed it in the lower right.