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Courbet was in his mid-twenties and freshly arrived in Paris when he painted this, and it is one of his earliest surviving works. He spent long days at the Louvre copying the old masters, and a reclining Venus by Correggio taught him how to lay a nude in a landscape. So the sleeping follower of Bacchus here is Courbet still learning, borrowing a soft, dreamy manner he would soon throw off entirely. Within a few years he would be painting quarrymen and village funerals at life size and scandalising the same Paris that admired pictures like this one.