Head of a Woman and Flowers

In the lower right corner, next to the signature, Courbet wrote 71 and Ste Pélagie, the name of the Paris prison where he was held in the autumn of 1871 for his part in the Commune. He was allowed to paint there, and much of what he painted was fruit and flowers. This canvas puts a person among them. A mass of dahlias, orange, yellow and white, fills the upper half, and below it a young woman with loose curly hair looks down at a sheet of paper in her hand. Early books on Courbet listed it as a woman reading a letter in front of dahlias. In November 1877 the picture was sold at a Paris auction that the French government ordered from works seized in Courbet's studio. It has been in Philadelphia since 1963, a bequest of the New York collector Louis E. Stern.