Woman with a Parrot
Gustave Courbet · 1866
01
Paris. The Salon of 1866.
Gustave Courbet sends in a nude.
The jury lets her in.
02
The parrot lands on her raised hand.
Wings still open.
03
Her hair spills over the sheet.
Critics complained about the hair.
And the pose. Ungainly, they said.
04
Behind her, a tall perch.
A dish at the top.
The bird has left it.
05
Bottom left: '66.
Gustave Courbet.
Two years earlier, the Salon threw out his nude as indecent.
The whole canvas.
Nearly two metres wide.
“Painting is an essentially concrete art, and can consist only of representation of real and existing things.”
Two parrots
The same year, Manet starts his own.
A young woman in a pink gown. A parrot.
One critic said he'd borrowed Courbet's bird.
Manet's reached the Met in 1889.
Courbet's followed in 1929.
Gustave Courbet
French · Realism · 1819 to 1877
Sources · 5