Portrait de Baudelaire

Courbet painted his friend Charles Baudelaire around 1848, in the middle of the year Paris rose in revolution and both men were young, broke and unknown. Baudelaire was 27, nearly a decade before the poems of 'Les Fleurs du mal' would make him famous and then get him prosecuted. Courbet shows him at a plain table, pipe within reach, absorbed in a book, the very picture of a struggling writer in a rented room. The two moved through the same Paris bohemia and argued about art in the same cafés. Later the collector Alfred Bruyas, Courbet's great patron in the south, bought the portrait and in 1876 gave it to the museum in Montpellier, where it still hangs. Courbet is said to have complained that he could never finish the head, because Baudelaire looked different every day.