The pale, wide-eyed young man tearing at his hair has been everywhere since the juicy Gustave Courbet retrospective opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art at the end of February.[1] He lunges at us, full lips parted, eyes staring in horror, enormous dark irises ringed with white. It’s not just the maddened expression or the aggressive frontality that makes the image so compelling—nor the fact that the guy is gorgeous, although it helps—but also the orchestration of contrasts: pale flesh vs. long, dark hair, muscular arms vs. delicate bone structure, full white shirtsleeves vs. big black tie, crazed gesture vs. neat little beard and silky moustache. Yet for anyone who knows anything about Courbet, it’s difficult to reconcile this wild-eyed refugee from a gothic novel with the man who described his aim as translating “the customs, ideas, and appearance of my time as I see them” into “a living art,” a political and aesthetic progressive, whose letters are full of protests against the popularity of Romanticism. Isn’t this the sort of image we associate with a card-carrying Romantic like—say—Théophile Géricault?

The painting is, of course, The Desperate Man (1844–45, private collection), painted when Courbet was twenty-five or twenty-six—born in Ornans, Franche-Comté in 1819, he died in exile, in Switzerland, in 1877. At the time he made The Desperate Man, he had been living in Paris for about five years and had recently had a work accepted for exhibition at the Salon for the first time. The