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COURBET, Gustave: Self-Portrait at Sainte-Pélagie

🖼 Self-Portrait at Sainte-Pélagie, c. 1872
Oil on canvas
92 × 72 cm
Ornans, France

Shadowed confinement captures a bearded man in prison garb, rendered with unflinching realism and muted tones. Courbet's self-portrait from his Sainte-Pélagie imprisonment documents political persecution following the Paris Commune uprising, transforming personal suffering into defiant artistic testimony.

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