Naming the room

One of the strangest, most modern things about The Painter’s Studio is that its “allegory” is built out of real people you could have met. The right side is not Justice and Wealth and Poetry in flowing robes. It is a guest list. Courbet packed the warm half of his canvas with his actual friends, painted from life or from photographs, and his letter to Champfleury runs through them almost like a man introducing you around a party. So let’s be introduced.

Several of them are home-country friends, and Courbet’s letter names them in a quick warm cluster: Alphonse Promayet (1822–1872), a violinist and childhood friend from Ornans, holding his violin; Urbain Cuenot, Courbet’s close friend from Ornans; and the poet Max Buchon (1818–1869). With them stands Alfred Bruyas — not just the collector whose money helped build the Pavilion but the friend Courbet had spent years writing to about what this very painting should mean, here taking his place among the people who shaped it. And there is Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865), France’s most famous radical thinker — the man who declared that property is theft — a native of the same corner of France. Proudhon wasn’t available to sit, so Courbet worked his likeness up from a photograph, which in 1855 was still a young, commercial technology not yet accepted as a respectable art — faintly disreputable for exactly that reason, and a very Realist way to build a portrait.

Near them sits Champfleury himself, the critic this whole explanatory letter is addressed to — and he was more than the man who coined the word “Realism.” Champfleury was the movement’s working theorist, the writer who argued out what Realism was and defended it in print while Courbet supplied the paintings; he and Courbet were building the same case from two ends. And then there is the fashionable couple— in Courbet’s phrase, a woman of the world and her husband, both luxuriously dressed — standing in as a pair of well-off art lovers, the kind of moneyed admirers a painter needs. The right side, in other words, is Courbet’s entire support system in one frame: the friends from home, the patron-collaborator, the radical philosopher, the movement’s theorist, and the rich couple who buy. A career, drawn as a crowd.

And then, at the very far right, hunched over a large open book and ignoring the whole gathering, sits Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) — the poet who a couple of years later would publish Les Fleurs du Mal(“The Flowers of Evil”) and be prosecuted for it, one of the defining writers of the modern city. Courbet didn’t paint him fresh; he copied the head from a portrait he had made of Baudelaire back in 1847. There is a small, real sadness folded into the figure: Courbet and Baudelaire had once been close, and by 1855 the friendship had cooled, so the poet sits at the edge of the painting, present but turned inward, reading, a little apart from the warmth of the group. He is on the shareholders’ side, but he is keeping his own counsel in the corner — which, for Baudelaire, was about right.

Now cross to the dark left side, to its most argued-over figure. Find him first: down in the lower-center-left foreground, seated and leaning forward in a broad-brimmed hat, with two hunting dogs resting at his feet, is a man dressed as a poacher — someone who hunts on land that isn’t his. For more than a century, a great many viewers have looked at that hat, those dogs, that curled moustache, and seen Napoleon III— the man who had seized power in a coup in 1851 and crowned himself Emperor of France, the ruler under whose reign Courbet was painting this very picture. Read that way, it is an astonishing thing to have done: to slide the Emperor onto the side of “the people who live off death,” cast as a poacher illegally hunting his own country, hung where the public could see it.

But this is exactly the kind of irresistible identification that the honest version of art history has to slow down for. Courbet’s own letter to Champfleury — the document that names nearly everyone else — never identifies this figure as the Emperor. And technical study of the canvas (X-rays that let conservators see the layers underneath) shows the poacher was reworked and added relatively late, not part of the original plan. So the Napoleon III reading, satisfying as it is, is an interpretation, widely held but never confirmed by the painter — the famous story rather than a signed caption. It may well be right. It is not, on the evidence, a fact. Hold it the way Courbet left it: a poacher who looks an awful lot like the Emperor, and a painter who declined to say so out loud.