The woman in the waves
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| La femme à la vague ("The woman in the waves") |
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| Gustave Courbet , 1868 |
| Oil on canvas |
| 65.4 x 54 cm |
| Metropolitan Museum of Art |
The Woman in the Waves is a painting by the French painter Gustave Courbet . The picture, created in 1868, is 65.4 x 54 centimeters and belongs to the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York .
In his picture, The Woman in the Waves ( La femme à la vague ), Courbet shows a young woman, reproduced as a half-nude , bathing in the sea. The body falls to the right. She has very light, translucent skin. The woman has pinned her wavy red-brown hair up at the back of her head, while a few wavy strands fall over her face. The arms raised high cross over the head. The water around your body seems a little lighter, here the small waves of the gray-blue water hit your body and become frothy due to the increased embedding of oxygen. The mood seems bleak, as the sun is about to fall, on the horizon of the right half of the last of which is Abendröte recognizable, also a distant moving boat. On the left in the background you can see a high rock that covers the entire side. Bottom left Courbet has on canvas painted oil painting signed and dated: 68 / G. Courbet .
The picture belongs to a series of nudes that Courbet created between 1864 and 1868, the most famous work from the series is today The Origin of the World . Courbet's preference for nudes was triggered by the success of Alexandre Cabanels with his picture The Birth of Venus , which he achieved at the Paris Salon in 1863, as well as further successes with nudes by other academy members . In The Woman in the Waves , as in this period, Joanna Hifferan is very often the model. The picture is characterized on the one hand by great realism, on the other hand it moves subject and location to a mythological level. The bather looks like the goddess Venus born from the foam , and the distant boat also lifts the image into a mystical plane. Courbet's realism undermines the ideas of the time and goes against the actual viewing habits. The real-looking skin and the reproduction of armpit hair does not correspond to the tradition from which the motif actually comes and in which it is nevertheless unmistakably. While other painters' depictions of Venus were barely veiled, Courbet's bathers are unmistakably revealing nudes that are deliberately intended to have a sensual effect and which should also provoke. Also in 1868 Courbet shows a similar motif in which he depicts his model in a similar pose, but as a recumbent full-body nude (now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art ).
Courbet sold the painting in 1873 to the art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel , who in 1875 sold it to the baritone Jean-Baptiste Faure . Durand-Ruel bought the picture back from Faure in January 1893 and sold it to the American sugar manufacturer Henry Osborne Havemeyer and his wife Louisine W. Havemeyer that same month . After her death in 1929, Mrs. Havemeyer donated The Woman in the Waves together with the majority of her extensive art collection as the H. O. Havemeyer Collection to the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, where it is kept and exhibited under inventory number 29.100.62 .
literature
- Kathry Calley Galitz: Gustave Courbet The woman in the waves , In: Angela Schneider, Anke Daemgen and Gary Tinterow (editor): The most beautiful French come from New York. 19th Century French Masterpieces from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York , ISBN 978-3-89479-381-4 , p. 98
