クレマン・ロリエ

1855 was Courbet's noisiest year. Paris was staging an Exposition Universelle, the jury kept his largest pictures out of it, and he put up a shed of his own beside the official building, charged admission and called it the Pavilion of Realism.

This portrait belongs to the quiet side of that year. Clement Laurier was a young lawyer who had just come into his family's house at Le Blanc, south of Paris, and was settling in as a country gentleman. Courbet painted him there against a dark, roughly worked sky and wrote in the lower left corner, to my friend Laurier.

Laurier had started out as a republican and a friend of Gambetta, the future republican leader, and made his name defending opposition journalists in court. He drifted rightwards, and in 1876 he took the parliamentary seat for Le Blanc with the backing of the monarchists.