Gli amanti felici

Courbet was in his mid-twenties and barely known when he painted this around 1844, and the man in profile, dark curls over a soft collar, is almost certainly himself. The woman leaning into him is thought to be Virginie Binet, his companion through those Paris years and the mother of his son. The mood is frankly tender. He later showed the picture in 1855 under the title The Waltz, its warmth much closer to the Romantic paintings then in fashion than to the blunt, life-size realism that would soon make his name a scandal.