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Fig. 31. Reclining Nude with Knee Socks, 1862, Private Fig. 32. White Stockings, 18XX,The Barnes Foundation,
Collection. Philadelphia.
Fig. 33. The Maidens on the Banks of the Seine, Summer, Fig. 34. Léon Riesener, Angélique, 1842, Musée du Louvre,
1856-57, Musée du Petit Palais, Paris. Paris.
In any case, the sleeping nude was one of the most ancient tropes in Western Art. By the 1860s Courbet had
made such images part of his stock in trade and was distancing them from their classical sources. Already in
the 1850s they became sexually explicit, as in a painting of a sleeping nude made in 1858 whose pose suggests
erotic reverie if not more.49 Not only do such figures have an increasingly contemporary look, some of them
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