Presumed Portrait of a Young Girl from Ornans

In 1842 Gustave Courbet was 23 and mostly teaching himself to paint, back home in Ornans, the small town in the Franche-Comte hills where he had grown up. The scandals were still years off, the vast canvases of ordinary country funerals and stone-breakers that would soon make critics furious. Here he simply painted a local girl, carefully, the way a young artist paints to learn a face. We no longer know who she was, which is why the title calls her only a presumed young woman of Ornans. What already shows is his patience with a plain, unidealised person from the place he came from. He signed the corner quietly, with his initials and the year.