The Source (Courbet)
| The Source | |
|---|---|
| French: Nude-La Source[1], La Font | |
 | |
| Artist | Gustav Courbet |
| Year | 1862 |
| Medium | Oil on canvas |
| Dimensions | 120 cm × 74.3 cm (47 in × 29.3 in) |
| Location | Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City |
| Accession | 29.100.58 |
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.
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
- ^ 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.
- ^ a b c "The Source". www.metmuseum.org. Retrieved 2020-05-16.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link) - ^ 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.
- ^ Roger Bonniot. Gustave Courbet en Saintonge, 1862–1863. Paris, 1973, pp. 88–89, calls it as "Baigneuse à la source" or "La source"
- ^ Royal Cortissoz. "Gustave Courbet at the Museum." New York Tribune (April 6, 1919), p. 7
Further reading
- Catalogue of the European Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, including The Source
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