Woman in a Riding Habit (L'Amazone)

By 1856 the Bois de Boulogne had just been remade into a public park with riding paths, and a woman on horseback there was something Paris looked at. Courbet's horsewoman was seen in his studio late in that decade by the critic Zacharie Astruc, who described her without recording a name. For a long time she was said to be Louise Colet, the poet who was Flaubert's lover. More recent research proposes Madame Clement Laurier instead, and the Metropolitan still treats the identification as unsettled. Mary Cassatt, who guided the American collectors Henry and Louisine Havemeyer, called it the finest woman's portrait Courbet ever painted, and it came to the museum with Louisine Havemeyer's bequest in 1929.