Portrait of H. J. van Wisselingh

Courbet was born at Ornans, near the Swiss border of France. After he went to Paris in 1840, he evolved a vigorous Realism with profound and influential philosophical and political implications. Already in the Salon of 1846, Courbet’s work was noticed by the Dutch art dealer H. J. van Wisselingh, who bought two paintings and presumably commissioned this portrait. Van Wisselingh also invited Courbet to visit Holland the following year so that he could study Rembrandt.

Rembrandt’s art was a touchstone for Courbet—as is evident in this portrait, in which deep shadows obscure physical fact and at the same time suggest poetic insights into the melancholy of the sitter and his world. Courbet’s emulation of Rembrandt and other seventeenth-century Dutch masters put him at odds with his most powerful contemporaries in the French Academy, for whom the idealizing art of the Italian Renaissance was paradigmatic.

Courbet’s relentless and outspoken disregard for academic principles, and the example of paintings like this Rembrandtesque portrait of a Dutch tradesman, quickly set the stage for a sweeping revolution in mid-nineteenth-century art. In concert with his extraordinary friend the poet Charles Baudelaire, Courbet advocated a popular art based on modern life, its dark sides included, inspiring the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists to find poetry in the prose of everyday activities and locales—as Rembrandt had done before them.