Portrait of a Woman: Juliette Courbet

By 1860 Gustave Courbet was the most talked-about painter in France, the man who had shown huge canvases of ordinary country people, a village funeral, stone-breakers at the roadside, and called it Realism to the annoyance of the Paris art world. Here he turns that same plain eye on his own family. The sitter is Juliette, the youngest of his four sisters, painted without flattery or soft light, set against an open landscape in sober, earthy colour. There is no attempt to make her prettier or grander than she was. Juliette never married, and she outlived her brother by decades. When Courbet died in exile in Switzerland in 1877, blamed for the toppling of the Vendome Column during the Paris Commune, she became his heir and spent the rest of her life defending his name and giving his studio pictures to French museums.