Portrait of Jules Bordet

Courbet signed this portrait in the lower left corner and added a dedication in the lower right, “to my friend J. Bordet”. Jules Bordet was a collector from Dijon who owned several of Courbet’s paintings, and this is a picture made for a friend rather than for an exhibition. It is dated 1870, a turbulent year for the painter. In June he turned down the Legion of Honour offered by Napoleon III’s government, and after the Empire fell in September he was put in charge of protecting the art in the Paris museums. The next spring, under the Commune, the Vendôme Column was pulled down, and he would be blamed for it and pay with prison and exile. Here Bordet sits in a white shirt and a pale linen jacket against a plain grey background, with a long dark beard. The canvas came to the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm in 1999, a gift from the surgeon Philip Sandblom and his wife Grace.