Portrait of M. Nodler, the Younger

In the autumn of 1865 Courbet was at Trouville, the Normandy resort where fashionable Paris went for the sea season. His reputation rested on stone breakers, a peasant funeral and hunting scenes, the sort of subject that got him attacked in the press as a socialist, and he spent that season painting the holidaymakers. He wrote home boasting about how many society women wanted portraits from him. The two Nodler brothers were among the sitters, young men he started at Trouville and finished afterwards. When he mounted his own exhibition in 1867, in a pavilion he paid for himself outside the official Exposition Universelle in Paris, both Nodler portraits went into it. This is the younger of the two. In that catalogue Courbet gave them the date 1866, the year he finished them, rather than the autumn he began.