Page 35 - Courbet

reveal sexual connotations through attributes such as clothing and their positions, which might include post-
coital allusions. Courbet thus went far beyond Proudhon’s attitudes.Although the latter subordinated women
to the male head of household, limiting them to domestic duties and child-raising within the home, he never
revealed the obsession with sex itself that emerges from the majority of Courbet’s nudes.Although Proudhon’s
views may have set women back farther than anything Courbet did, it was Courbet who came closer to
resembling a sexual predator, even if proof that he crossed the line from art to reality is circumstantial.

According to legend, the Emperor Napoléon III struck The Bathers with his whip.50 Even though its principal
figure is shown from the rear, that aspect of her anatomy’s prominence caused a stir and presented a convenient
target. Following the Salon, Courbet felt forced to paint a sort of sheet or towel around part of her ample
buttocks. Next to the main figure is a servant or companion.The exchange of gestures between the two ladies
is ambiguous, but becomes suspect when one notices that the seated woman has taken down her underwear.
Playing even more provocatively with clothing, Reclining Nude of 1862 (Fig. 31) is naked except for knee-socks.
She has a shoe on her left foot but not on the right, and the right stocking is loose. Although she lies on her
back, her hips are turned to the front.

The play with stockings in Reclining Nude echoes a picture at the Barnes Foundation in which a naked woman in
a landscape looks coyly out at the viewer as she puts on her white stockings (Fig. 32). Courbet’s use of the same
stockings clearly indicates the relationship between the two pictures. The model could be the same as well.
What she was doing with them off in White Stockings is easy enough to guess and is corroborated by a picture
called The Demoiselles on the Banks of the Seine (Fig. 33).The elegant word ‘demoiselles’ is a facetious euphemism,
for these are clearly courtesans if not common prostitutes. A man’s boating hat sits in the skiff behind the
women, who have been transported to a secluded spot; the reclining one is in her petticoat.The picture caused
another sensation for Courbet at the Salon of 1856.Yet it is certainly more chaste than either White Stockings
or Reclining Nude.

Of course the sleeping pose of Reclining Nude had a distinguished lineage. One only has to think of Giorgione’s
(or Titian’s) Reclining Venus in Dresden, which was followed by many others, some awake, some not. It
was popular in Romanticism as in works by Delacroix and his follower Léon Riesener (Fig. 34) whose
work consciously looked back to the eighteenth-century Rococo. Courbet’s contribution was to flout ideal
(but not idle) reverie by emphasising not simply nudity but undress, bringing his figures into sync with
contemporary mores. Mistresses, courtesans, and prostitutes were de rigueur in contemporary French life,

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