Young Ladies of the Village

Courbet painted Young Ladies of the Village in 1851 and 1852, after returning to his hometown of Ornans in eastern France. He was 32 years old and had just caused a scandal at the Salon of 1850 with A Burial at Ornans, a 20-foot painting of a peasant funeral that he submitted as a history painting. The jury accepted it, the public was outraged, and Courbet became the most controversial painter in France. Young Ladies of the Village was his next submission, and it provoked the same reaction. The painting shows three young women from Courbet's family walking across a field at the edge of Ornans. They wear fashionable city dresses, out of place in the rural landscape. A young peasant girl tends a herd of goats at the left, watching the women pass. The cliffs of Ornans rise in the background, painted in the gray-beige limestone of the Jura region. The composition is wide and low, with the figures placed in the lower third of the canvas and the landscape filling the rest. The three women are Courbet's sisters, Zelie, Juliette, and Zoe. They were not young ladies of the village in any literal sense: they were the daughters of a prosperous farmer, educated in the city, visiting Ornans for the summer. The painting's title, which Courbet chose, gives them a social identity that the painting itself complicates. They are in the village but not of it, and the contrast between their city clothes and the rural landscape is the subject of the painting. When the painting was exhibited at the Salon of 1852, critics attacked it on every front. The figures were too small for the canvas. The dresses were painted without detail. The landscape was flat and monotonous. The goat girl was too coarsely drawn. One critic wrote that the painting looked like a sketch that had been stretched to monumental size. Courbet replied that he was painting what he saw, not what the Academy told him to see, and that the landscape of Ornans was as worthy of a large canvas as the battlefields and mythological scenes that filled the Salon walls. Oil on canvas, 194 by 251 centimeters. Courbet painted the landscape with a palette knife, building the cliffs and fields in thick, flat layers of paint. The figures are painted more carefully, with the dresses rendered in thin, smooth strokes of white and gray. The contrast between the rough landscape and the smooth figures is deliberate: it mirrors the social contrast between the village and the city women. The horizontal format and muted palette make this print work well in a living room, dining room, or hallway. The earth tones and soft greens pair with wood floors, stone walls, and traditional furniture. The 18x24 size is the best choice, as the composition needs width to read. The painting has a calm, observational quality that suits rooms with a quiet mood. The painting entered the Met's collection in 1923, gifted by Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, the same collector whose bequest brought many other Courbet paintings to the museum. This is a public domain artwork (CC0), scanned from the original at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. We print it on archival matte paper at sizes from 8x10 to 18x24 inches, framed or unframed. The image is printed at full resolution with no cropping.