Femme couchée

Courbet painted this reclining nude in 1865, the same spring that Manet's Olympia was drawing outrage at the Paris Salon. Courbet had his own reputation as a provocateur, the leader of the Realists, who insisted on painting ordinary flesh rather than polished goddesses. Here a red-haired woman lies asleep on a white sheet at the foot of tall trees, her body given real weight and warmth, unidealised. The picture's later travels were rougher than its calm surface suggests. It changed hands across Europe and reached the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg as trophy art after the Second World War, one of countless works moved east when the fighting stopped.