Портрет Гюстава Шоде

Courbet painted this friend, the journalist and lawyer Gustave Chaudey, in 1870, on the edge of a year that would undo them both. When the Paris Commune rose the following spring, Courbet joined it and took charge of the city's art. Chaudey, though a man of the left himself, was accused of having ordered troops to fire on a crowd months earlier, and was arrested. In the Commune's final days, on the 23rd of May 1871, he was shot by a firing squad. Courbet had opposed the arrest of his friend and could not stop it. Within two years the painter himself was in exile in Switzerland, where he died. The portrait keeps Chaudey as he was before any of it, calm and unhurried against a plain dark ground.