Portrait of Zelie Courbet

Critics who attacked A Burial at Ornans at the 1851 Salon complained that Courbet had given a village funeral the size and the seriousness of a history painting. The mourners in it were not types. Three of them were his sisters, and the middle one, Zélie, is the woman in this small portrait.

She sat for him again and again through those years. The same jury saw her as one of the young ladies of the village, and asleep over her spinning wheel. Nancy's museum dates this head between 1853 and 1855, when the row about Realism was at its noisiest and he was still going home to Ornans to paint his family.

Zélie never married and died of tuberculosis in 1875. Her brother outlived her by two years, in exile in Switzerland after the fall of the Paris Commune.