Jules-Antoine Castagnary

Courbet painted this in 1870, the year he refused the Legion of Honour in a letter he made sure the newspapers printed, telling the government that the state was incompetent in matters of art. Within months the Empire had collapsed. By the spring of 1871 he was serving the Paris Commune and had called for the Vendome Column, Napoleon's victory monument, to be pulled down. That cost him six months in prison and, later, a bill for putting the column back up, which drove him into exile in Switzerland. The man in this portrait, Jules-Antoine Castagnary, was the critic who had defended his painting from the start and went on defending it afterwards. He was still writing a life of Courbet when he died in 1888, and never finished it.