The Sleeping Spinner

Courbet showed this at the Paris Salon of 1853, at a time when a picture this size was expected to hold a goddess or a saint, not a country girl asleep over her spinning. That was rather the point. Courbet was building his case for Realism, painting ordinary rural people at the scale reserved for heroes, and letting the critics splutter. The young woman has nodded off at the wheel, the yarn slack in her fingers, everything warm and heavy with the afternoon. Some say the model was the painter's sister Zelie, though nobody is certain. The canvas ended up in Montpellier because of one devoted patron there, Alfred Bruyas, who collected Courbet and left this picture to the town's museum in 1868.