The Woman in the Waves

Courbet painted this bather in 1868, and to a Paris audience raised on smooth marble Venuses rising from the foam, it landed as a provocation. The pose quotes the old myth, a woman with her arms lifted, the sea at her waist. But Courbet paints her as a real body, heavy and warm, and leaves the tuft of dark hair under her raised arm plainly in view. That one detail was enough to break the convention, because ideal nudes were always hairless and marble-clean. He was the loudest voice of Realism, insisting that painting should show what is actually there rather than what is flattering. Notice how solid the flesh looks against the loose grey-green churn of the water behind her, which he brushed in fast and thick.