Marc Trapadoux che esamina un libro di stampe

In the late 1840s Courbet's world was a smoky Paris beer hall, the Brasserie Andler, where he drank with poets and painters and worked out the blunt, unidealized style he would soon call Realism. This is one of that circle: Marc Trapadoux, a philosopher and journalist and a friend of the poet Baudelaire, so tall and so fond of a green coat that the group nicknamed him the green giant. Courbet shows him not posing but simply absorbed, bent over a large book of prints, his face lit against a dark ground. He sent the picture to the Salon of 1849, the same season a revolution had just reordered France. There is nothing grand in it, just a real man looking closely at pictures. It was among the works that made Courbet's name at that Salon.