Courbet sits at the centre of his studio painting a landscape of his native Ornans, watched by a nude model and a boy. To the left crowd figures from ordinary life; to the right stand his friends and supporters, among them Baudelaire, Proudhon and his patron Alfred Bruyas. He subtitled it "a real allegory" and, when the 1855 World Fair rejected it, showed it in his own Pavilion of Realism.
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At the far right, Baudelaire sits absorbed in a book. A white cat plays at the painter's feet.
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