Woman with a Parasol, Mademoiselle Aubé de la Holde

In the summer of 1865 Courbet was installed at Trouville, the Normandy resort where fashionable Paris went for the sea. The casino had given him an apartment looking out over the water, and he turned it into a portrait studio. He wrote to a friend that more than 400 ladies had come to see his portrait of a Hungarian countess, and that he was now at work on the next one, a young lady from Paris named Mademoiselle Aubé de la Holde. This is that picture. She stands on the shore under a parasol with a striped wrap over her arm, and Glasgow Museums point out how Courbet ties her to the evening behind her, the blue stripes of her sleeves set against the orange band of sunset. Two years later he hung it in the one-man show he staged near the Pont de l'Alma in Paris.