Die Quelle

The Source was a safe, well-worn subject in Courbet's France. Academic painters used it for a flawless nude nymph at a woodland spring, a body made respectable by pretending she was a goddess. Ingres had painted an ideal version a decade earlier that everyone knew. Courbet, the loud champion of Realism, took the same title in 1868 and painted a real woman instead, seen from behind, solid and heavy, her skin marked by the actual light of the woods as she reaches toward the trickle of water. There is no myth here to excuse her. That refusal to prettify was exactly what made critics uneasy about him. The stream, the mossy rock and the dappled shade are given the same blunt attention as the body, and nothing in the scene is idealised.