Les Baigneuses

When Courbet showed this at the Paris Salon of 1853, it caused an uproar. For centuries a bather in a painting had meant a goddess, a Venus or a Diana, an excuse for an idealized nude. Courbet gave the public instead a heavy, ordinary woman climbing out of a pool, her back broad and dimpled, her feet dirty, her clothes dropped in a real wood. The critic Théophile Gautier, appalled, compared her to a Hottentot Venus with a monstrous rump. What offended was not nudity but the refusal to flatter. This was the Second Empire, and Courbet could risk such an attack on official taste only because he had a highly placed protector at Napoleon III's court. The picture found a friend too. A young collector from Montpellier, Alfred Bruyas, bought it, which helped set Courbet free to paint as he pleased. It has hung in Bruyas's own city, in the Musee Fabre, since 1868.