카로이 백작 부인의 초상

Gustave Courbet made his name with big, deliberately unglamorous canvases of stonebreakers and country funerals, the kind of realism that scandalized the Paris juries. This is something much smaller and quieter, barely a foot high. It dates to 1865, a year Courbet spent largely on the Normandy coast, around Trouville and Deauville, where fashionable society came for the sea season. He painted the waves there, and he painted a run of portraits of the elegant women who summered on the coast. The countess sits among them, a Hungarian aristocratic name attached to a face Courbet studied closely. The picture has stayed in private hands, surfacing at auction rather than in a museum.