Naked Woman Lying on a Couch

In 1873 the Paris Salon still expected a nude to be a goddess. A naked woman was welcome on the wall only if she was a Venus or a nymph, kept safely inside myth. Caillebotte was about 25 that year, not yet the painter of Paris streets he would become, and he drew this instead, a real woman stretched out on an ordinary couch, rendered with a plain anatomical honesty that made no excuses and told no story. Nothing here pretends to be antiquity. It is pastel on paper, worked with the frankness of something seen rather than imagined. The candor was too much for its moment. The sheet was never shown in public and never sold while he lived, and it stayed out of sight for decades, a private study by a man far better known for rain on a boulevard. It is now promised to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.