Portrait de Monsieur Corbinaud

Portrait de Monsieur Corbinaud (1863), in the collection of the Musée des Beaux-Arts de la ville de Paris, represents Courbet's commercial portraiture practice which ran parallel to his more celebrated public painting. Throughout the Second Empire, Courbet maintained a busy portrait practice, painting members of the professional and commercial bourgeoisie who found his reputation for uncompromising directness an attractive quality in a portrait. A Monsieur Corbinaud — the first name is not documented — would have been a bourgeois client of some kind, seeking a record of his physiognomy and social standing. Courbet's bourgeois portraits lack the political freight of his self-portraits or his paintings of Proudhon and Berlioz, but they are no less technically accomplished. He consistently avoided the props and settings of official portraiture, placing sitters against plain grounds and trusting to the power of direct facial observation. The Petit Palais collection includes this alongside other Paris-relevant works.

Courbet's male portrait technique at this period involves a dark neutral background, careful facial construction from dark underpainting to warm flesh highlights, and more summary treatment of clothing. The face receives the concentrated technical attention; jacket and cravat are indicated with competent but less engaged brushwork.