Page 38 - Courbet

Fig. 39. Woman with a Parrot, 1866,The Metropolitan Fig. 40. Sleep, 1866, Musée du Petit-Palais, Paris.
Museum, NewYork.

ability to create illusions of female endowments and seductive flesh. If anything, Manet’s image of Olympia’s
angularity and handling of her epidermis were off-putting.

The following year therefore Courbet made his retort to Manet’s daring. In his Woman with a Parrot (Fig. 39),
he showed a post-coital courtesan lying voluptuously on her back, a colourful tropical bird landing on her lazily
upraised hand.The parrot was one of those exotic pets associated with kept women.The mussed up sheet and
the coverlet tossed on the floor suggest the rough calisthenics of love-making.The surface on which the lady lies
resembles more the divan of a courtesan’s boudoir than a proper bed for sleeping. Whereas Manet’s figure seemed
more transactional than seductive, Courbet’s figure, despite exhaustion, retains her curvaceous attractions.
Courbet expected the sensations of material presence and spatial illusion he was able to produce to trump
Manet’s comparatively schematic picture. Manet’s realism consisted of upending conventional representations
of the female nude by unmasking the power women could exert in the face of male desire. Courbet, by contrast,
reinforced those conventions thanks to both the optical and physical realism of his picture. He reaffirms the
fantasy of male dominance by showing a woman satisfied, relaxed and smiling playfully following her sexual
encounter – unless she is smirking at how easy it is for a well-built woman to make a few quid.

It may be surprising therefore that in 1866 Courbet painted a lesbian picture called Sleep that is surely one
of the most beautiful and carefully executed works of his career (Fig. 40). It was made for a wealthy patron,

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