The Source (Courbet)

The Source is a mid 19th-century painting by French artist Gustav Courbet. Done in oil on canvas, the painting depicts a nude women in a stream. Courbet's work is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The Source
French: Nude-La Source[1], La Font
ArtistGustav Courbet
Year1862
MediumOil on canvas
Dimensions120 cm × 74.3 cm (47 in × 29.3 in)
LocationMetropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Accession29.100.58

Description

The Source depicts a nude woman caressing a flowing stream. Courbet painted the woman in such a way as to deviate from the contemporaneous idealized female form. Courbet may have painted Source in direct response to Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres' 1856 painting The Source, which features a highly idealized female subject in a similar scene.[2]

The identity of Courbet's model is unknown; some sources speculate she modeled for Courbet twice,[3] while others state she only modeled once.[4] Source has been compared to Gauguin's 1893 painting The Moon and the Earth and Ingres' The Source.[5]

American feminist and philanthropist Louisine Havemeyer (1855 – 1929) acquired the painting in 1916, and later bequeathed the painting to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.[2] Prior to this, she had anonymously lent The Source to the Met during an exhibition of Courbet's work in 1919.[2]

References
  1. H. O. Havemeyer Collection: Catalogue of Paintings, Prints, Sculpture and Objects of Art. n.p., 1931, pp. 80–81, ill., calls it "Nude-La Source" and dates it about 1862.
  2. "The Source". www.metmuseum.org. Retrieved 2020-05-16.
  3. Louisine W. Havemeyer. Sixteen to Sixty: Memoirs of a Collector. New York, 1961, pp. 185, 197–98, claims that the figure was painted in France and the landscape at Courbet's villa in Switzerland; states that she bought the picture from Durand-Ruel by cable in 1915 [see Ref. Weitzenhoffer 1986]; compares it to another version of the same subject (Musée d'Orsay, Paris; F627), suggesting that the same model was used for both pictures.
  4. Roger Bonniot. Gustave Courbet en Saintonge, 1862–1863. Paris, 1973, pp. 88–89, calls it as "Baigneuse à la source" or "La source"
  5. Royal Cortissoz. "Gustave Courbet at the Museum." New York Tribune (April 6, 1919), p. 7

Further reading
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