Sunday, June 22, 2014

Portrait of a Little Girl (1840)

Gustave Courbet: Portrait of a Little Girl

Courbet made his mark in French art with his many realistic landscapes and scandalous nudes. But this, his first offering on this blog, is one of my favorite portraits. So much is of interest here - the girl's gaze which is, uncharacteristically for a portrait, looking elsewhere than at the viewer; the fact that she appears to be of the common people and not the nobility; and the color scheme, which is muted and seems designed to draw attention to the main point of interest: the girl's face.

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