Saint Nicholas Reviving the Little Children

This is Courbet before Courbet. In 1847 he was a young painter from Ornans still taking work from the church, two years before The Burial at Ornans would make him the most argued-about artist in France. The commission was a modest one, an altar picture for a country parish showing the old legend of Saint Nicholas, the bishop who was said to bring murdered children back to life and so became the guardian of the young. Courbet paints it in the warm, shadowed manner of the Baroque masters he had copied in the Louvre, with the heavenly light and the bishop's robes the story asked for. One detail already points where he was going. The holy figures are not invented types. He posed people he actually knew, a friend standing in for a saint, so a real Franche-Comté face looks out from the sacred scene.