Portrait of a Young Girl

Portrait of a Young Girl, painted in 1857 and held at the National Gallery of Art, reveals a gentler, more intimate register in Courbet's portraiture than his controversial large-scale Realist statements might suggest. Courbet painted numerous portraits throughout his career, typically of friends, family members, and patrons, and his approach — direct observation, avoidance of idealization, attention to the specific physical and psychological character of the sitter — applied the same principles to portraiture that he brought to landscape and social subject painting. A young girl as subject invited a particular kind of attentiveness: Courbet could observe childhood as unselfconsciously as he observed rock or forest, with neither sentimentality nor the heavy-handed symbolism that conventional academic portraiture of children often imposed.

Oil on canvas, this portrait deploys a warm, moderate palette that avoids both the stark tonal contrasts of Courbet's landscape work and the academic smoothness his critics demanded. The young girl's face is rendered with direct observation of its specific features — the proportions of childhood, the particular expression of an individual face — rather than a generalized ideal of juvenile prettiness. Brushwork is confident and visible in the background, smoother in the face.