Woman with a Parrot

Courbet painted this in 1866 and exhibited it at the Paris Salon that year. It is a large canvas, over five feet wide, showing a reclining nude woman on a white sheet with a parrot perched on her raised hand. The woman lies diagonally across the bed, her head resting on a pillow at the left, her legs extending to the right. Her dark hair spreads across the white sheet. The parrot is green and red, perched on her right hand, which she holds up toward the viewer. The sheet is rumpled, and the dark red drapery behind her fills the upper portion of the canvas. The flesh is painted in warm tones with visible brushwork, a departure from the smooth finish of academic nudes. Courbet was forty-seven in 1866 and at the height of his career. He had been the central figure of the Realist movement since the 1850s, when paintings like The Stone Breakers and A Burial at Ornans had challenged the academic conventions of the Salon. He wrote to a friend that he wanted to paint a nude that the conservative Salon jury would accept, and this painting was the result. Manet painted his own version of the subject the same year. Realism, as Courbet practiced it, meant painting contemporary subjects with directness rather than idealizing them. The Salon nudes of the 1860s were usually mythological figures, goddesses in classical poses. Courbet's woman was recognizably a modern person, with individual features and a body that did not conform to academic proportions. The painting found favor with younger artists. Cezanne reportedly carried a photograph of it in his wallet. Oil on canvas, 129.5 by 195.6 centimeters. Courbet used a palette knife for the drapery and sheet, building thick layers of paint. The flesh is smoother, worked with brushes in short strokes. The large scale and warm palette of this painting make it suitable for a bedroom or private space with warm lighting. The reds and greens pair well with dark walls and gold or wood frames. The 18x24 framed version is the most practical size for most rooms. The painting entered the Met's collection in 1929 through the Havemeyer bequest. This is a public domain artwork (CC0), from The Metropolitan Museum of Art. We print it on archival matte paper at sizes from 8x10 to 24x36 inches, framed or unframed. The image is printed at full resolution with no cropping.