ART MARKET / Up for Sale

A SELF-PORTRAIT by Gustave Courbet (1819-1877), in charcoal, graphite and white chalk on buff paper, which London dealer Kate Ganz has for sale at just over dollars 800,000 ( pounds 533,000). It is in the exhibition 'Heads and Portraits: Drawings from Piero di Cosimo to Jasper Johns', which she has mounted at Jason McCoy, New York. Courbet led the French Realist movement, a forerunner of Impressionism, and was a supreme self-publicist. Here he uses the format of a realist portrait to promote a romantic image of his identity, a Bohemian genius, poor but brilliantly talented.

(Photograph omitted)