Beginnings

Gustave Courbet

Woman with a Parrot

1866

Oil on canvas, 129.5 × 195.6 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

A life-size nude sprawled on a rumpled sheet, shown at the 1866 Salon by the leader of Realism. Courbet used the scale of a Salon nude but gave her no myth.

• Courbet paints a real body at life size, tangled hair and all, not an ideal one. The Impressionists took from Realism this demand to paint people as they are.
• At the 1866 Salon, several critics objected to the awkward pose.
• The state briefly thought of buying it, but it stayed with Courbet until 1870.
• Manet began his own woman with a parrot the same year.
• Louisine Havemeyer's bequest brought it to the Met in 1929.

Courbet led Realism from about 1850 and refused gods and heroes as subjects. Here he turned that stance on the nude, the academy's most valued subject.

Image: The Metropolitan Museum of Art Open Access · CC0