Mujer con un papagayo

Courbet had spent years being turned away. In 1864 the Salon jury rejected a nude of his as indecent. So in 1866 he tried again, more carefully, with this. A woman lies on her back on rumpled sheets, a small bright parrot perched on her raised hand, her dark hair spread loose across the bedding. It was the first nude the official Salon actually accepted from him, and critics found it more elegant than they had feared. Even so it unsettled them. The loose hair and the clothes dropped on the floor made her feel less like a timeless goddess and more like a real woman in a real bed. The model is thought to be Joanna Hiffernan, the red-haired Irishwoman who sat for several painters of that circle. The parrot's claws grip her fingertips as it beats its wings.