The Painter's Studio

In 1855 Paris was throwing itself a world's fair, the Exposition Universelle, and the jury turned this enormous canvas down for lack of space. Courbet did something no established painter really did back then. He built his own shed nearby, hung a sign reading Pavilion of Realism, charged admission, and showed the rejected picture himself alongside about forty others. This is what the crowds came to see. It's almost twenty feet wide, and Courbet called it a real allegory summing up seven years of his life. He sits in the middle, painting a landscape, with a nude model and a small boy watching. To his right he placed his friends and supporters, the writers and collectors. To his left, the ordinary people and figures of the wider world. Delacroix, the grand old Romantic, slipped into the pavilion, stood in front of it, and wrote in his journal that he couldn't tear himself away from it.