Portrait of Paul Ansout

Courbet was in his mid-twenties when he painted this, around 1844, still years before he became the loud champion of Realism who scandalised Paris. This is early, quieter work. The sitter, Paul Ansout, was a young man from Dieppe on the Normandy coast, shown with his chin resting on his hand, gazing off past the frame in a thoughtful, faintly Romantic mood that was the fashion of the day. It was the same year the Salon jury first accepted a Courbet, a self-portrait, after turning him away before. The dark ground and the close attention to the young man's features already show the plain, unidealised looking that Courbet would soon push much further.