Woman with a Mirror

Courbet painted this in the winter of 1859 into 1860, back home in Ornans, the small town in eastern France where he grew up. A dark-haired young woman sits half-turned, holding up a hand mirror, her neckline bare. For a long time a woman at a mirror was a standard warning about vanity in painting. Here Courbet keeps the mirror and leaves out the moral, giving a plain and private moment instead. It belongs to a small group of mirror pictures he made that same season. When he later showed work of this kind in Brussels, the Belgian public warmed to his frank, unidealised women more easily than Paris tended to, and this canvas eventually made its way to Basel, where it hangs today.