El ternero blanco

Courbet painted this white calf in 1873, in the last months he would ever spend in his home country. He had been a leading figure in the Paris Commune of 1871 and was held responsible for the pulling down of the Vendome Column, a Napoleonic monument in Paris. Facing a ruinous bill for its re-erection, he slipped across the border into Switzerland at the end of 1873 and never came back, dying there four years later. He was proud of this calf, a Montbeliarde he had spotted in a neighbour's herd near Ornans, and tried again and again from exile to enter it in exhibitions abroad. It was blocked every time, and first shown publicly at a memorial exhibition in Paris in 1882, five years after his death.