Portrait of Juliette Courbet

Courbet signed this portrait across 1873 and 1874, the years he crossed into Switzerland to escape a French court. After the fall of the Paris Commune in 1871 he had been blamed for toppling the Vendome Column, jailed, then ordered to pay for its costly rebuilding. Rather than face that bill he went into exile, where he died in 1877. The sitter is Juliette, the youngest of his three sisters. She had modeled for him since childhood, and after his death she became the fierce keeper of his estate, fighting for years to protect his name and hold his work together. The handling here is quiet and sober, closer to the plain portraits of his early years than to the scandals that made him famous.