The Lovers in the Countryside

The bearded young man seen in profile, holding a red-haired woman by the hand, is Courbet himself in his early twenties, not long after he left Ornans for Paris to train as a painter. The woman is Virginie Binet, his companion through much of the 1840s and the mother of his only son. She wears a crown of green bindweed, the kind of weed you pick on a country walk, and he gave the picture a subtitle about the feelings of youth. It is a soft, almost tender Courbet, the romantic side he showed early and mostly set aside once his large, deliberately plain scenes of country life made him a public figure. He returned to these two figures more than once, and the version kept here in Ornans, the town where he was born, is one of several.