Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

Dated 1865 and now in the Musée d'Orsay, this second and more celebrated portrait of Proudhon — posthumous in execution, completed after the philosopher's death in January 1865 — shows the thinker on the steps of his home, surrounded by his daughters and his papers, caught in a moment of informal domestic existence. Proudhon had been the central theoretical influence on Courbet's understanding of art's social function, and the portrait is both documentary and testimonial. Unlike the more formal 1853 portrait study, this version embeds Proudhon in his actual lived context — family, domestic space, intellectual work — making it one of the most complex and socially engaged portraits in the mid-nineteenth-century French tradition.

The outdoor step setting required Courbet to combine his domestic genre skills with the outdoor figure observation he developed in hunting and bathing subjects. Proudhon's informal clothing and posture required careful observation of the way fabric drapes on a seated or semi-reclining figure. The papers and books surrounding him are given still-life treatment with the same material precision as his hunting trophies.