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COURBET, Gustave: Portrait of Baudelaire

🖼 Portrait of Baudelaire, c. 1848
Oil on canvas
54 × 65 cm
Montpellier, France

Soft brushwork renders Baudelaire's contemplative face against muted tones, capturing the poet's introspective intensity. Courbet's realist approach revolutionized portraiture by abandoning idealization, presenting his artistic contemporary as a complex, modern intellectual rather than romanticized figure.

The story of art
The story of art
E. H. Gombrich
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