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Mme L . . . (Laure Borreau)
Gustave Courbet (French, 1819–1877)
1863
- Medium
- oil on fabric
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- Framed: 112.4 x 93 x 12.1 cm (44 1/4 x 36 5/8 x 4 3/4 in.); Unframed: 81 x 61.2 cm (31 7/8 x 24 1/8 in.)
- Culture
- France, 19th century
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, Modern European Painting and Sculpture
- Credit line
- Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Teens profiles and older: its museum says too little about what it shows to place it for younger viewers. How works are placed
View at the Cleveland Museum of Art
About this work
Gustave Courbet painted four portraits of Madame Laure Borreau; this is the last and most highly developed. As a realist, Courbet aimed to represent what he saw in the visible, tangible world. He represented Madame Borreau in a black silk dress embellished with lace and a matching hat. Gold and violet lights of sunset softly illuminate the background. However, the portrait is not idealized. Courbet’s inclusion of her shadowed eyes and full-fleshed neck prompted one critic to write, “I daresay in nature she may be very pretty, but in Courbet’s picture she is nothing less than offensive.”
