Donna con un gatto

Courbet made this in 1864, and part of what he is doing is answering a rival. A couple of years earlier the young American Whistler had made a stir with a portrait of a woman dressed all in white, a near-monochrome study. Courbet, the blunt champion of French Realism, seems to have wanted to prove he could handle white better — the rumpled sheets, the loose shift, the pale skin, all built from close, subtle tones. His subject, though, stays earthbound: a woman at her dressing, hair down and gown slipping, with a small cat caught mid-stretch on the bed beside her, which is how the painting came by its name. It has hung in the Worcester Art Museum, in Massachusetts, since 1940.