Portrait of Jules Vallès (1832-1885), author

Courbet painted this portrait around 1861, when its sitter, Jules Vallès, was a struggling young journalist in Paris with a gift for making enemies of the powerful. The two men shared their politics. Both were republicans who despised the empire of Napoleon the Third, and both would be caught up in the Paris Commune ten years later, in 1871, when the city rose and governed itself for a few violent weeks. Vallès sat in the Commune and then fled into exile in London under a death sentence, while Courbet was jailed for his part in pulling down a monument. Here, though, none of that has happened yet, and Vallès is simply a sharp-eyed young writer, set down plainly against a dark ground.