Ritratto di Zélie Courbet

Zelie was one of Gustave Courbet's younger sisters, and in the early 1840s, when he was barely 20 and still learning his craft, she and her sisters were his most patient models. He painted her here in strict profile, her hair braided into a chignon and pinned with a small sprig of ivy, in a manner that looks back to Italian Renaissance portraits. Zelie kept turning up in his work for years, most famously as one of the well-dressed young women offering coins to a cowherd in his Young Ladies of the Village. She never married and stayed close to the family in Ornans. Another of the Courbet sisters gave this portrait to the Petit Palais in Paris in 1909.