Жюльетта Курбе в десять лет

Gustave Courbet painted this in 1841, when he was 22 and barely known, still shuttling between Paris and his family's home at Ornans, in the Franche-Comte countryside. The sitter is his youngest sister, Juliette, about ten years old. He catches her as if she has just glanced up from a book, head tilted, the faint beginning of a smile, a sidelong look that feels caught rather than posed. Courbet returned to his sisters again and again in these early years. They were free models, and he plainly loved them. A decade later the same plainness he practises here, painting ordinary people exactly as they were, would scandalise Paris when he turned it on peasants and mourners at life size. Juliette outlived him by nearly forty years and helped look after what he left behind after he died in exile.