The Source

Courbet painted this nude bather in 1862, and it was quietly picking a fight. A year earlier Paris had admired a work by Ingres on the same theme, a flawless, marble-smooth young woman tipping water from a jar, the source of a spring turned into a polished ideal. Courbet answers with a real woman, seen from behind, solid and heavy, her weight sinking into the mossy bank as she reaches up into a thin fall of water splashing over her arm. There is no myth and no jar, just skin, wet leaves, and moving water painted with a loaded brush. He kept the classic title, The Source, and let the ordinary body do the arguing. It now hangs in the Metropolitan Museum in New York.