Portrait of the Poet Pierre Dupont

Pierre Dupont wrote songs, and one of them, the Song of the Workers, was being sung in the streets of Paris in 1848. After Louis-Napoléon's coup in December 1851 he was sentenced to seven years of banishment for exactly that kind of writing. By 1868, when Courbet painted him, the empire had loosened its grip a little and Dupont was back in Paris, 47 years old and visibly worn. Courbet gives him no lyre, no manuscript, nothing at all to say what he did for a living. The collar is open, the tie is loose, the head is pushed close to us. Nobody commissioned the portrait and nobody paid for it, and Courbet kept it himself. Dupont died in July 1870, six weeks before the Second Empire collapsed at Sedan.