Portrait of Amand Gautier (1825-1894), painter

1867 was a loud year for Gustave Courbet. Paris was hosting a World's Fair, and rather than submit to the official show he did what he'd done once before and put up his own pavilion nearby, filling it with about 130 of his paintings. In the middle of that self-promotion he painted this quiet, dense portrait of an old friend, Amand Gautier, a painter from Lille who shared his plain realist convictions and had known him since the early 1850s. There's no flattery in it, just a solid, watchful face. What neither man could see was how close the reckoning was. Four years later both were pulled into the Paris Commune, and Gautier, elected to the artists' committee, would be arrested and held in a Paris prison. The portrait hangs today in Lille, the city where Gautier was born.