Sleeping Nude

By 1858 Gustave Courbet already had a reputation for painting things the official Salon in Paris would rather not see. Three years earlier, when the world's fair turned down his largest canvases, he had built his own shed next door and charged admission to a show he simply called Realism. A reclining nude like this one sits inside a very old tradition, the Venetian line that runs back through Titian and Giorgione, a beautiful woman asleep in a landscape. What Courbet does with it is refuse to smooth her out. The nudes the Salon rewarded that decade were polished until the skin looked like porcelain. This body has weight, real folds and warmth, laid down with a loaded brush. The picture eventually traveled a long way from that argument. It hangs today in the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo, built around the collection of the Japanese industrialist Kojiro Matsukata, who bought European painting early in the 20th century.