Das Spalier

Courbet made his name with life-size peasants and stonebreakers that shocked the Paris of the 1850s, a painter who insisted art should show real, present-day life and nothing borrowed from myth. So this burst of flowers comes as a surprise. He painted it in 1862 while staying in the Saintonge region of western France, where a wealthy host gave him a garden and a greenhouse, and Courbet turned out flower pieces by the dozen. A young woman in a flower-printed dress reaches into a trellis so heavy with blooms it almost swallows her. He gives the humble genre of flower painting the grand scale he usually saved for human figures. The blossoms, not the woman, fill most of the canvas.