The story
In 1842 the young Gustave Courbet, a few years after leaving Ornans in the Franche-Comté for Paris, painted himself with long hair, a dark bohemian coat and a black spaniel that a friend had given him that May. The picture is small, about 27 centimetres high, and it belongs to the municipal museum of Pontarlier, which bought it in 1938. It is an early example of the many self-portraits Courbet painted in the 1840s.
The museum occupies an old manor house on the Place d'Arçon, in a town some 800 metres up in the Jura mountains, close to the Swiss border. Its other great subject is local. From 1805 until France banned absinthe in 1915, Pontarlier was the capital of the green spirit, with about 20 distilleries, and the museum keeps the posters, photographs and objects of those years. Alongside them hang paintings by artists of the Franche-Comté, many of them given through the town's Salon des Annonciades, held since 1924.
