Madame Auguste Cuoq (Mathilde Desportes, 1827-1910)

Mathilde Desportes was the wife of Auguste Cuoq, a wealthy Parisian collector, and several painters tried their hand at her portrait. Her husband turned most of them down. This one, begun by Courbet around 1852, was among the rejected — reportedly because Cuoq felt it did not do justice to his wife's beauty. Courbet kept working at it and only counted it finished in 1857, the date he later assigned it in the catalogue of his own Paris show. She stands in dark silk against a plain background, painted with the solid, unflattering directness that got Courbet labelled a realist. The picture crossed the Atlantic and entered the Metropolitan Museum in New York in 1929, part of the Havemeyer bequest.