Woman with White Stockings (La Femme aux bas blancs)

Courbet painted this in 1864, one of several frankly erotic canvases he made through the 1860s for private buyers rather than the public Salon. The tradition he was pushing against dressed the female nude as Venus or Diana, a goddess with an alibi. Courbet strips that away and gives a real woman pulling on a white stocking, her body plainly and deliberately exposed. Work this explicit was never meant for a gallery wall, and it was shown nowhere in his own century. It surfaced only in 1926, when the American collector Albert Barnes bought it from a Paris dealer and carried it back to Philadelphia, where it hangs among his Cezannes and Renoirs.