Self-Portrait

In 1852 France was only months past Louis-Napoléon's coup d'état of December 1851, and by the end of the year it would be an empire again. Courbet, an outspoken republican, spent that spring in full public view. His big canvas of his three sisters giving alms to a young cowherd, shown at the Salon, was bought by the Duc de Morny, the new ruler's half-brother and one of the men who had organised the coup. This self-portrait comes from the same year and belongs to a far more private register. It is a small wooden panel, about 43 centimetres tall, with the painter turned towards us, fingers pushed into his beard. It came to San Francisco in 1969 from the collection of Dr. T. Edward Hanley and his wife Tullah, of Bradford, Pennsylvania.