La Jeune Baigneuse

In 1853 Courbet showed a picture at the Paris Salon of a heavy, ordinary-looking woman climbing out of a pool, and the offence it caused stayed attached to his name for years, since a nude at that scale was expected to be a goddess or a nymph. He came back to the subject 13 years later on this canvas, about 1.3 metres tall, and by 1866 the objections had largely worn out. In the same year he painted two nudes privately for Khalil Bey, an Ottoman diplomat living in Paris, who kept one of them behind a curtain in his apartment. This picture went to Louisine Havemeyer in New York and reached the Metropolitan Museum through her bequest in 1929.