Gustave Courbet

One of Courbet’s best-known and most famous pictures is The Meeting, or Bonjour, Monsieur Courbet (pictured), from 1854. In a nondescript summer landscape three men meet on the road. The figure on the right is Courbet, holding a long walking stick, with a backpack containing his painting equipment on his shoulder. The bearded artist depicts himself as an independent “master painter”, almost a vagabond, as he meets the collector Alfred Bruyas, his servant and his dog. The arrangement of the picture is unaffected and represents a new realist style. Courbet spent the summer with Bruyas in Montpellier in southern France, where he met eminent local patrons of the arts and painted their portraits.

From the page of The Desperate Man