Portrait de Mme Charles Maquet

Courbet's portrait of Madame Charles Maquet, dated 1856 and held in Stuttgart, belongs to his mature portrait period when he was producing both intimate portraits of friends and more formal commissioned likenesses. Madame Maquet's identity and her relationship to Courbet are not fully documented, but the 1856 date places the portrait in the years of his greatest celebrity following the scandals of the 1855 Exposition Universelle where he had mounted his own private Pavilion of Realism. A formal female portrait at this period would have brought Courbet into contact with the bourgeois world he sometimes criticised — the commission requiring him to produce a likeness satisfactory to his subject's social self-image while remaining consistent with his own pictorial values.

Courbet manages the tension between his Realist aesthetic and the social expectations of a bourgeois portrait commission through a balance of honest characterisation and sufficient attention to dress and setting to meet the sitter's expectations. The face receives his most invested handling, the costume more summary treatment.