Las tres bañistas

Courbet finished these three women bathing at a stream around 1868, in the forests of his native Franche-Comte, where he liked to set such scenes. A few years later his life turned. He had taken part in the Paris Commune of 1871, the short-lived revolutionary government, and after its fall he was imprisoned. While he sat in jail the canvas left his studio and passed into a dealer's hands. Friends of his, the critic Castagnary among them, tracked it down, and in 1874 it was returned to him. Courbet painted flesh the way the official Salon disliked, heavy and real and unidealised, closer to the women he actually saw than to any goddess. The blonde bather sits with her feet already in the water while her companion in a red skirt holds the third back from the slippery rock.