Dozing Woman

This quiet picture of a woman drifting off to sleep dates from about 1852, from Courbet's early years. Resting and sleeping figures were a subject he returned to throughout his life, painted with no story or moral attached, just a body at ease. Beyond its date and its maker, little is firmly recorded about this particular canvas. Today it hangs a long way from the France where it was made, in the collection of the Tottori Prefectural Museum of Art in western Japan.