O vagabundo

In 1845 Courbet was 26 and sending five pictures to the Paris Salon, of which the jury took one. Around then he began painting the people of the roads. The man here is a chemineau, a tramp walking from farm to farm looking for work, at a time when vagrancy was a criminal offence in France and carried months in prison. Courbet gave him a canvas nearly 172 centimetres high, the full-length format kept for people thought worth recording. The painting came to the town of Dole in 1911 in a bequest, and for years afterwards it was listed as the work of Courbet's studio rather than his own hand. It was given back to him after cleaning and a fresh study by a Courbet specialist, and the museum made an exhibition out of that reversal in 2005.