Young Communards in Prison (Les Fédérés à la Conciergerie). Artist: Gustave Courbet (French, Ornans 1819-1877 La Tour-de-Peilz). Dimensions: Overall: 10 3/16 x 6 1/2 in. (25.9 x 16.6 cm). Date: 1871.The intensity of Courbet's political views landed him in prison in 1871. As a leading dissident of the liberal Paris Commune, he was held responsible for the destruction of the Vendôme Column and was locked up in the stables of Versailles. Later, he was sentenced to six months at the prison of Sainte-Pélagie in Paris. To judge from an attached inscription, Courbet must have been at Versailles when he made this drawing of fellow jailed Communards; he sent it to the magazine L'Autographe, where it was published. The artist evidently wished to emphasize that among those held under dreadful, terrifying conditions were juveniles, some scarcely more than infants. Courbet's gritty illustration shows a graffiti-marked prison cell in which a boy, slumped on the stone floor, and a child crying on a