The sculptor Marcello (Duchess of Castiglione-Colonna)

In 1870 Gustave Courbet stood at the height of his fame and was about to lose nearly everything. Within a year France would be at war with Prussia, Paris would rise in the Commune, and Courbet, who took part in it, would be jailed and bankrupted over the toppling of a public monument. This portrait comes from just before that break. His sitter is a fellow sculptor, the Swiss-born Adele d'Affry, who showed her work at the Paris Salon under a man's name, Marcello, borrowed from a Venetian composer she loved, because a woman carving marble was still treated as an oddity. She had refused to model for Edouard Manet, but she sat for Courbet. She died of tuberculosis nine years later, at 43, still exhibiting as Marcello.