Autoportrait

1850 was the year Gustave Courbet forced everyone to look at him. He was in his early thirties, a big confident man up from Ornans in the Franche-Comte countryside, and at the Paris Salon that season he hung enormous canvases of ordinary village people, a country burial, laborers breaking stones, painted at the scale usually reserved for kings and saints. Critics were appalled. He called it realism and set it deliberately against the polite tradition of the Salon. This self-portrait belongs to those same years, the young painter taking his own measure just as he became the most argued-about artist in France. It hangs now in Besancon, the main city of the region he came from and never stopped painting.