Retrato de Max Buchon

Max Buchon was a poet from the Franche-Comte who had been Courbet's friend since their schooldays at Ornans. When Louis-Napoleon seized power in December 1851, Buchon was on the losing side of it and crossed into Switzerland, settling in Bern. Courbet went to stay with him there in 1854, and the writer Champfleury followed in the summer of 1855. Out of those conversations among exiles came the short statement on realism that Courbet published in 1855, the year of this full-length portrait, when he put up a shed of his own outside the Paris world's fair to show the pictures the official jury had refused. The canvas never went back to France. It was given to the museum at Vevey, a few minutes along Lake Geneva from La Tour-de-Peilz, where Courbet himself died in exile in 1877.