Portrait of H. J. van Wisselingh

When Courbet painted this in 1846 he was 27 and still largely unknown, years away from the Realist pictures that would make him notorious. That year, at the Paris Salon, a Dutch art dealer named Hendrik van Wisselingh noticed his work, bought two paintings, and commissioned this portrait of himself. He also invited the young painter to Holland the following year to study Rembrandt in person. You can already see where that interest was heading. The sitter's face surfaces out of deep brown shadow, lit as if by a single low source, closer to a 17th-century Dutch portrait than to anything fashionable in Paris. Courbet worked on a wooden panel that had been given a smooth white ground on one side, then turned it over and painted on the rougher back.