When the young Courbet arrived in Paris in late 1839, he was no beginner. He firmly intended to build on the teaching he had received while at the College de Besangon, in the studio of the classical painter Charles-Antoine Flajoulot. There,renting a room in the house where Victor Hugo was born, he had made an intensive study of drawing. Flajoulot's academic teaching complemented the lessons Courbet had received during his school days in his native Ornans (Franche-Comte).It had given Courbet an idea of the task that lay ahead of him, taught him the art of composition - at which he was a natural - and imparted an acute sense of the role that line would hold in the realization of his ambitions. We have evidence for this in the four lithographic vignettes made for the Poetic Essays (1839) of his friend Max Buchon. Sensitive, evocative and idealist, they are Romantic in spirit: The Virgin of the Old Oak, Storm, My Rosebush, and The Lady of the Lake....