Gustave Courbet, the Realist painter, sits for this carte de visite portrait by Pierre Petit’s Paris studio at 31 Place Cadet. Courbet joined the Paris Commune in 1871 as a delegate for the arts, and his earlier proposal to dismantle the Vendôme Column, a monument to Napoleonic militarism, became the central charge against him once the Commune fell.

He is shown seated, body turned to one side, his hand resting on a cane propped against the floor. A heavy dark coat drapes loosely over his shoulders, left open over a white shirt and waistcoat, and his full beard and tousled hair frame a direct, composed gaze toward something beyond the camera. His cross-legged posture and relaxed grip suggest an informal, unposed moment within the studio setting.

Though Courbet had argued only for relocating the column to the Hôtel des Invalides, the Commune voted for its outright demolition on April 12, 1871, four days before his own election to its council, and the column fell on May 16. After the Commune’s suppression he was arrested, tried, and imprisoned for his presumed role in the demolition, and in 1873 the National Assembly held him personally liable for the cost of rebuilding it, a debt that drove him into exile in Switzerland, where he died in 1877.

The reverse is inscribed in pencil, “Courbet / who destroyed the column of Vendome,” over the printed studio imprint of Pierre Petit, Opère Lui Même, 31 Place Cadet, Paris, noting the Exposition Universelle 1867 medal, with the archival notations “3/11/07,” “COBAEDX,” and “Eb.”