Las señoritas del pueblo

The three well-dressed women crossing this field are Courbet's own sisters, Zélie, Juliette and Zoé, out walking near Ornans, the village in eastern France where he grew up. One of them stops to offer food to a barefoot cowherd girl. Courbet had high hopes when he sent it to the Paris Salon of 1852, and the critics tore into it. They mocked the sisters' plain country faces, the odd jumps in scale between the figures and the cattle, even the small dog. Courbet shrugged it off in a letter home, writing that the day he stopped being controversial was the day he stopped mattering. He kept the provocation up for the rest of his career. The little valley he set them in was common village land, open to everyone, which is partly why the ragged girl and the Sunday-dressed sisters share the same ground.