The Siesta during the Haymaking Season

Courbet made this during the summer of 1867, staying with a friend in the Doubs valley of his native Franche-Comté, where he had grown up among exactly this kind of work. He painted the haymaking at its dead point, the noon rest, when the labourers and their oxen simply stop and doze in the heat. What was provocative was the size. A canvas over two metres tall was the format reserved for kings, battles and saints, and Courbet gave it to farmhands asleep in a field. When he finally showed it at the Salon of 1869, the critics went after the animals. One dismissed the oxen as hydrocephalic. Another accused him of a taste for ugliness. Courbet never sold it in his lifetime. The City of Paris bought it at the sale of his studio in 1881, four years after he died in exile.