Charles Suisse

Suisse, a former artist’s model, established an informal—and extremely liberal—art school in Paris which the young Courbet attended in the mid-1840s. By the time of this portrait, dated to 1861, Manet, Monet, and Pissarro had also studied at the Académie Suisse. The sitter’s spectacles and tousled gray hair indicate that he is getting on in age, but his gaze is sharp and animated; a fitting tribute to an early creative influence, painted the same year that Courbet opened a teaching studio of his own. (Source: The Metropolitan Museum of Art)