Page 16 - Courbet

EARLY FANTASIES

A t first glance, Mother and Child on a Hammock exemplifies a genre popular among Romantic painters of
the 1830s and 1840s – small, delicately painted pictures that recall the eighteenth-century Rococo.
The patterned carpet and the young woman’s clothing with its embroidered borders and little pom-
poms are, in addition, stylishly orientalising while alluding to another fashionable trend within Romanticism.
Both Orientalism and Rococo painting were often coloured by eroticism.The latter is absent from Mother and
Child however, which is one reason why it is intriguing. Portraits apart, there is virtually no other painting
in Courbet’s entire oeuvre that is as chaste and warmly familial as Mother and Child. The painting provides a
contrast to The Hammock, which the painter submitted under the title The Dream to the Salon of 1845. The
latter is set in an isolated corner of a garden, much as in Mother and Child, or perhaps at the edge of woods that
vaguely echo Barbizon school painters’ evocations of the Fontainebleau Forest. Contrasting with Mother and
Child, however, The Hammock’s sleeping girl has undone her bodice, no doubt for relaxation, with the result
that her ample breasts and pointed nipples show through a filmy undergarment. Her entwined legs dangle over
the hammock’s side and her right arm stretches upwards, suggesting a tension in her body, the upper part of
which is precariously near the hammock’s edge. It takes but little effort to imagine the kind of dream she may
be having. Although the model here is less exposed than is the case for The Bacchante (Fig. 7) or Bather Sleeping
Beside a Brook (Fig. 8), this may be because The Hammock is a relatively plausible image but, equally, was not
subtle enough for the Salon jury of 1845, which rejected it.

Whereas The Hammock is certainly an erotic fantasy, Mother and Child may be termed a domestic one. It appears
as if Courbet might have been exploring two sides to love. In any case, the comparison begs the question as to
Courbet’s attitude towards both love and women.This often raised question is due to the apparent blatancy and
promiscuous character of numerous later Courbet nudes. The potential is already evident in the 1840s, with
the Bacchante and the Bather Sleeping, but it becomes far more explicit thereafter. Mother and Child, however,
introduces a note of complexity to the conventional view that Courbet saw women merely as objects of desire.
This difference may, perhaps, be explained by Courbet’s biography.

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