Bathers (Baigneuses)

Five years earlier Gustave Courbet had scandalised the Paris Salon with a large, unidealised bather, a heavy woman seen from behind whose sheer ordinariness the public found almost offensive. This 1858 canvas is a quieter return to the same theme, and Courbet did not paint it alone. The wooded setting and its pool were largely the work of his friend Hector Hanoteau, a landscape painter, while Courbet added the nude figures. He was back in his home country around Ornans in the Franche-Comte, the river valleys he returned to all his life. He set his solid, plainly real bodies into an actual shaded pond rather than a classical grove, exactly the kind of local water he had grown up beside.