Retrato de una joven

1857 was the year Courbet sent Young Ladies on the Banks of the Seine to the Salon, a canvas more than two metres wide showing two women sprawled asleep on the grass in city clothes. Critics read it as a claim about who the women were and what they were doing there, and attacked it accordingly. In the same year he signed this small head of a girl at the lower left and shortened the date to 57. Who she was is not recorded. When the painting was sold in Paris in 1929, out of the collection of Gustave Cahen, the catalogue listed it only as Portrait of a Young Woman. Chester Dale bought it for his New York collection and left it to the National Gallery of Art in 1963.