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Dimensions: 60 by 73.2cm., 23 5/8 by 28 7/8 in.
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Provenance: Probably acquired from the artist by Galerie Durand-Ruel, Paris, 1873
Bernheim Jeune, Paris (by 1909)
Société Gallia (acquired from the above; government sequestration sale, Messrs Sortais and Pape, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, 28 June 1923, lot 4, sold for 8,000 FF)
Bernheim Jeune, Paris (purchased at the above sale)
Acquired by the family of the present owner by 1929
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Exhibited:
Paris, Galerie Bernheim Jeune, Exposition de trente-deux tableaux de G. Courbet , 1909, no. 3 (or no. 17)
Paris, Musée d?Orsay, L?Origine du monde. Autour d?un chef-d?oeuvre de Courbet , 1996-97, n.n.
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Literature: J. Meier-Graefe, Corot und Courbet, Munich, 1905 & 1912, p. 219, illustrated
C. Sterling and M. Salinger, French Paintings: A Catalogue of the Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1966, vol. II, p. 214
H. Toussaint, Gustave Courbet, exh. cat., Paris, Grand Palais, 1977, p. 188
Arts Council of Great Britain, Gustave Courbet, exh. cat., London, Royal Academy of Arts, 1978, p. 169
Robert Fernier, Courbet, Geneva, 1978, vol. 2, p. 4, no. 258, catalogued and discussed; p. 5, illustrated
Pierre Courthion, Tout l'oeuvre peint de Courbet, Paris, 1987, p.102, no. 517, catalogued and illustrated
Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, ed. and trans., Letters of Gustave Courbet, Chicago and London, 1992, p. 487 (for a letter, dated 22 February 1873, from Courbet to Jules Castagnary, in which he mentions a painting he calls Head of the Woman with Parrot, presumably the present work)
Laurence Des Cars, De l?impressionnisme à l?art nouveau, Paris, 1996, p. 31, illustrated
Valérie Bajou, Courbet, Paris, 2003, p. 341
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Notes: Painted at the height of Courbet's artistic powers, Femme nue belongs to the series of major and at the time controversial nude paintings he made in 1865-66, including Femme au perroquet (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art), for which Femme nue is a finished and signed study; Le Sommeil (Paris, Musée du Petit Palais); and, most famously and perhaps notoriously, L'Origine du monde (Paris, Musee d'Orsay). Femme nue, which has not been on the market since the 1920s, is the last great Courbet nude from this period still in private hands. Gustave Courbet painted Femme nue in 1865-66, at the moment when his superb portraits and sensual, life-size paintings of nudes were finally beginning to win the controversial Realist a wide-reaching popular success. Eccentrically posed, with her head thrown back and her wavy brown hair spilling over the lower corner of the composition, the young model of Femme nue has an extraordinary physical presence. Heightened by Courbet's dramatic lighting and his flair for rendering human flesh, the girl?s half smile, faint blush and Siren pose seduces the observer. Courbet probably originally conceived of Femme nue as an independent painting, before adapting it as the central portion of the much larger painting of a young woman lying languorously across a velvet divan, amusing herself with a magnificent parrot perched on her upraised hand. That picture, Femme au perroquet was exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1866 to considerable acclaim and his first truly popular success. Yet, of the two paintings, Femme nue is certainly the more immediate and arguably the more powerful. To turn the audacious pose of Femme nue into a suitable Salon image, Courbet had to subdue the telling spontaneity that is the smaller painting's most compelling quality. For Femme au perroquet, he physically distanced the viewer from the model with a wide expanse of crumpled sheets, an elaborate tapestry backdrop, and a view into a distant landscape. More importantly, by giving his young woman a large, multicoloured bird to play with and gaze up at, Courbet eliminated the direct interaction between the nude model and the observer that provides the particular shiver of titillation that is at the heart of Femme nue. In this respect, the identity of Courbet's model for Femme nue and Femme au perroquet is a particularly intriguing question, the young model's individuality being central to the appeal of both works. The close focus on the girl?s face, the precision of observation in the details of brows and mouth, all suggest a specific, very present, sitter rather than an idealized or imagined 'memory' of a woman. Georges Riat, one of Courbet's first biographers, claimed to see in Femme au perroquet (by extension Femme nue) and Femme à la vague the same model, although he attached no name to the young woman in either painting. Charles Sterling, cataloguing both pictures for the Metropolitan Museum in 1966, agreed with Riat's suggestion. For today's viewer, the fact that the sitter for Femme à la vague is a coppery red-head, while the model in Femme nue has much darker tresses may be puzzling; but Courbet often altered a model's hair colour in other paintings, and otherwise the critical facial features of long, lush eyebrows, pointed and lightly dimpled chin, full cheeks and plump throat are strikingly similar. Femme nue was almost certainly modeled for Courbet by Jo Hifferman [sic.], a young Irish girl who was the model and mistress of the English-American artist Whistler, and whose beauty Courbet greatly admired. Courbet met Jo in Whistler's company in Paris in the early 1860s; and during the autumn of 1865 all three were together for several weeks in Trouville. Courbet was outspoken in his admiration for Jo and for her thick, wavy and lustrous red hair. During the Trouville visit, he painted Jo, la belle irlandaise, one of his most beautiful genre-portraits as well as one of his own favourite paintings. Femme nue might very well have been posed by Jo at the same moment, with or without the then-unfinished Femme au perroquet in the back of Courbet's mind. It seems more likely, however, that Courbet painted the present work when Jo visited Courbet alone in Paris later in the year when Whistler was travelling abroad. Such a rendez-vous, very likely clandestine, gave Courbet further reason to veil the sitter?s identity. From the appearance of Courbet's life-size painting of stonebreakers, Les Casseurs de pierres (formerly Dresden, destroyed in 1945), and the immense Un enterrement à Ornans (Paris, Musée d'Orsay) in the Salon of 1850-51; through to his ambitious self-promotion in paintings such as La Rencontre (Bonjour M. Courbet) (Montpellier, Musée Fabre) and L'Atelier du peintre (Paris, Musée d'Orsay), Gustave Courbet was a figure of unrivalled controversy in the mid-nineteenth-century French art world. During the 1850s, his large scale paintings of peasants and the commonplaces of village life branded Courbet as a 'socialist' leading revolution into the hallowed galleries of the Louvre. Yet even when he undertook less politically-charged subjects such as the female nude, Courbet still managed to be provocative. He mocked academic tradition by favouring figures of generous proportions in overtly sensual poses; he painted with defiantly bold brushwork and he used a wide selection of palette knives, a technique that was deemed at the time to be highly unorthodox. Courbet?s use of the palette knife is of particular interest in the ambiguous form of the white drape in the top right of Femme nue. The lushly applied impastos contrast with the flat negative space of the model?s black gloved hand giving the composition a strikingly modern note. As an ardent self-publicist, Courbet was well aware of both the standing to be obtained from the exhibition of his work in the annual Salon in Paris, and the professional advantage to be gained from having his work acquired by the French State. Courbet was encouraged in this second respect by the visit to his studio of the Comte de Nieuwerkerke, the Second Empire Minister of Arts, and the distinct impression that the Minister left with Courbet at the time that Femme au Perroquet would be purchased by the Government after its exhibition at the Salon of 1866. In developing the sensual Realism of the present work into Femme au perroquet, however, Courbet was also determined to unmask the pretensions of the outmoded academic traditions that the Salon held so dear. In his Salon submission Courbet was particularly keen to respond to the retardaire classicizing style of Alexandre Cabanel whose Naissance de Venus was being hailed as the last word in contemporary taste. Shown at the Salon of 1863 and famously purchased by the French Emperor, Cabanel's Venus was one more alabaster goddess; a recumbent version of a classical sculpture, floating in on a soft rolling wave surrounded by putti. Enticing, of course, but denying her own reality on every level. In contrast, Courbet brought in a colourful parrot, the kind of exotic pet associated with wealthy courtesans or women very much of this world, preserving in his Salon submission a strong touch of the flesh and blood pulse of Femme nue. Yet the physicality of Femme nue was not intended simply to shock. Rather, it probes to the very heart of Courbet's artistic preoccupation - some would say obsession - with the theme of fertility and life-giving force. The almost womb-like sense of enclosure in Femme nue, of the figure against a dark, enveloping background, can be compared to the deep, cocooning caves in Courbet's depictions of the source of the Loue river in his beloved native Ornans, while the water found in these and his wave paintings finds echoes in the cascading shawl in Femme nue. Women and water are symbollically, and symbiotically, linked in Courbet's artistic vision, which finds its ultimate expression in works such as La Source - showing a full length nude seated by a stream and holding her hand under a gushing spring) - and Femme à la vague. Although a Realist, Femme nue shows Courbet to be full of lyricism and the urge to express abstract ideas. Some critics have seen Courbet's provocative nudes as a response to the assertive and worldly Edouard Manet, whose Olympia (Paris, Musée d'Orsay) was shown in the Salon of 1865. However Courbet's frequent references to Cabanel and to Paul Baudry (another academic master well-known for his nudes) in correspondence around 1865 underline his concern with these more established rivals. Interestingly, however, it was Manet who was almost certainly answering Courbet when he himself painted his own Jeune dame en 1866 (Femme au perroquet) a few months after the Salon. Manet's woman of the world stands upright and more modestly veiled in a shockingly pink dressing gown, but looks provocatively right at the viewer. Tantalizingly, Cézanne is said to have carried a photo of Femme au perroquet in his wallet for years, which may well have been one of the influences behind his own nudes. The true heir to Femme au perroquet and Femme nue is of course Renoir, whose many bathers from every stage of his career speak to the same passion for full, pulsing flesh, and for a pretty, contemporary face. The present work has been requested for the exhibition Courbet to be held in Paris at the Grand Palais (October 8, 2007 - January 28, 2008); New York at the The Metropolitan Museum of Art (February 25 - May 18, 2008) and in Montpellier at the Musée Fabre (June 13 - September 28, 2008).
We are grateful to Alexandra Murphy for her assistance in cataloguing this work.
Femme nue has been seen and authenticated by Jean-Jacques Fernier and will be included in his forthcoming Courbet catalogue raisonné.
Femme nue has also been seen and authenticated by Sarah Faunce and will be included in her forthcoming catalogue raisonné on the artist.
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