In attempt to gain exposure in the Exposition alongside his fellow painters, he painted the large 11 x 20 ft. The Studio of the Painter: a Real Allegory Summing Up Seven Years of My Artistic Life (The Studio) in just six months. The Studio, however, got rejected, and instead, Courbet organized a private exhibition, the "Pavilion of Realism," on the opposite side of the road from the entrance of the Exposition, charging only ten sous. Among the low amounts of attendees and critics, Delacroix came to admire, and later wrote in his diary, "I think all these machines are very depressing...Afterwards I went to the Courbet exhibition...and discovered a masterpiece in the picture they rejected."

The Studio separates two different groups of people. On the right, "his various artistic and bohemian friends," in his Parisian life, such as Baudelaire, Champfleury, and Bruyas. And on the left resides people from his home life in Ornans such as "the people, misery, poverty, wealth, the exploited and the exploiters, [and] the people who live off death." Some of these people include Louis Napoleon, the Minister of State Echille Fould, Lazare Carnot, some European Revolutionaries such as Garibaldi, Kassuth and Kosciuszko, and a Jew. In the middle of the painting, Courbet paints in his studio with the admiring youth and a nude model.

Against most male painters of the time and possibly "an instance of modernism," the woman does not represent "a muse," but a mere model, not to be heightened to any sexual fantasy such as Ingres.