Realism in France

Gustave Courbet

Young Ladies on the Banks of the Seine (Summer)

1856–57

Oil on canvas, 174 × 206 cm. Petit Palais, Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris

Two young Parisian women lie on the riverbank on a summer day, one half asleep.

• It caused a critical scandal at the Salon of 1857.
• The Petit Palais finds its realism in "the frankness of the faces and postures."
• Rumpled clothes and unguarded poses, with no classical pretext, carry the picture.

Image: Wikimedia Commons · Public domain