The Village Girl with a Goat Kid

Ten years before this, Courbet had scandalised Paris by hanging life-size portraits of ordinary villagers, gathered in an enormous canvas of a country funeral, on walls that expected gods and generals. By 1860 he was an established troublemaker who still went home every year to Ornans, his small town in the Franche-Comte, near the Swiss border. Here he paints one of its girls up close, a young goat tucked against her, a wreath of green leaves in her loose auburn hair, the background dropped away into darkness so nothing distracts from her steady look back at you. There is no myth in it and no lesson, just a real person from his own valley, painted at the scale usually kept for a saint. The picture stayed in the region and now hangs in the Ornans house where Courbet once lived, today the museum devoted to him.