Autoritratto

In May 1842 a friend made Courbet a present of a black spaniel, and he wrote home to his parents in Ornans about the dog almost at once. He was 23 and two years into Paris, working at the Academie Suisse, a studio where you paid your share of the model's fee and nobody taught you anything. This is the earliest of his self-portraits, painted on a canvas you could hold in one hand, and he has dressed for it, in the loose dark coat and careful hair of a young man who wants to be taken for a Parisian rather than a boy from the Doubs. Two years later he worked the same pose and the same dog, grown up by then, into a much larger picture, and that one got him into the Salon of 1844. Pontarlier bought this first version for its museum in 1938.