Self-Portrait at Sainte-Pélagie

In the spring of 1871, the Paris Commune pulled down the Vendôme Column, the bronze pillar topped by a statue of Napoleon that stood for the empire the city had just overthrown. Courbet had argued for taking it down, and once the Commune was crushed he was held responsible for the whole affair. This is how he chose to picture himself afterward: seated at a barred window in the Sainte-Pélagie prison, pipe in hand, heavier and greyer than the confident man of his earlier self-portraits, looking out past the bars rather than at us. He kept the loose, plain brushwork and the unheroic honesty that had always got him into trouble. The state later handed him the bill for re-erecting the column, some 300,000 francs, and rather than pay it he crossed into Switzerland, where he died in 1877.