Young Ladies on the Banks of the Seine (Summer)
Gustave Courbet (1819 to 1877) · 1857
Two young women lie in the shade of a tree at the edge of the river on a hot afternoon. The one in front has taken off her dress and rests in her petticoat and corset, her eyes half closed, a garland of flowers dropped beside her. Her companion, still fully dressed in a yellow gown with a shawl and a bonnet, leans on her elbow and looks out at us. A rowing boat is moored in the water behind them. Nothing is happening, and that was precisely the problem: when the painting was shown at the Salon of 1857, critics were scandalised that Courbet had painted two ordinary Parisian women of doubtful respectability at this enormous size, the scale once reserved for history painting.
Courbet paints the scene with the frank physicality that made him the leader of Realism. The bodies are heavy and real, the fabrics are described with a loaded brush, and the light is the flat, warm light of a summer afternoon rather than the golden glow of an idealised landscape. Look at how the foliage is built from thick strokes and at the way the white petticoat is modelled with greys, and notice the odd flatness of the reclining figure, which some contemporaries read as deliberate provocation. The picture already contains the subject the Impressionists would take up a generation later: leisure on the banks of the Seine.
The painting stayed with Courbet's family after his death, and his sister Juliette gave it to the Petit Palais in 1906, which is why it hangs in a municipal museum rather than in the Louvre or Orsay. It anchors the museum's nineteenth century galleries. One detail to remember: a small oil study for the composition survives, and in it the women look a good deal more demure than in the finished picture.
Did You Know? Proudhon, the anarchist philosopher and Courbet's friend, wrote that the picture showed the moral decay of bourgeois women, which Courbet cheerfully accepted as a compliment.
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