Nude with Flowering Branch

1863 was a loud year for the nude in Paris. At the Salon that spring Napoleon III bought Cabanel's Birth of Venus, smooth, mythological and exactly what the jury wanted. The same emperor ordered a second exhibition for the thousands of rejected pictures, where Manet showed a naked woman picnicking with two dressed men and was mocked for it across the city. Courbet had a canvas thrown out of both, an anticlerical scene of priests staggering home drunk.

He painted this one in the same year. The model is a living woman of his own time, holding out a branch in blossom that is usually taken for cherry.

It became the first Courbet nude to reach America. Louisine Havemeyer and her husband, New York sugar money, had agreed between themselves to buy no nudes, and bought it anyway in 1892. It came to the Metropolitan with her bequest in 1929.