Le Hamac

Courbet was 25 when he painted this young woman asleep in a hammock, in a shaded glade with a stream running past. It is a soft, dreaming picture, and it draws on a poem by Victor Hugo about a girl drowsing outdoors. None of it looks like the blunt Realism that would soon make him notorious. He sent the canvas to the Salon of 1845 in Paris, the annual show that could make a young painter's name, and the jury turned it down. In France it still carries a title that fits its mood, Le Rêve, the dream.