Sleeping Nude

The paintings of nude women displayed in public venues such as the Salon were given the most ideal proportions and a smooth skin surface, and placed in some mythological or Oriental context in order to sublimate the purely carnal nature of the image. Conversely, quite a few paintings or prints for private display in individual's bedrooms were created with either erotic images of women or erotic acts. Courbet sought to disrupt this dual standard for images of nudes by frequently entering nudes in the Salon that had not been idealized, so-called "ugly" nudes. Sleeping Nude is one of these bedroom pictures depicting a woman asleep on a bed by a window, and thus can be placed in the lineage of the "nudes in a landscape" genre created by the Venetian school, starting with Giorgione and Titian. However, here the private scene of a nude woman in a bedroom and the view out the window reminiscent of the painter's home town in the Franche-Comté region makes the image much more realistic than a Venus set in a pastoral scene. Consequently, the viewer is made strongly aware that he or she is peeping into a private space, a bedroom in which a nude woman is sleeping. The curtains hung in the window and the red bed curtains seem to frame the nude, while also revealing the landscape. Considering that Courbet frequently displayed a tendency to consider his landscapes and nudes in the same terms, clearly it can be thought that both the nude woman in the interior and the landscape outside were directed at the male gaze, and the combination mutually heightens the effects of that gaze. Sleeping Nude derives originally from images of Venus in a pastoral scene, and here the window connects the two. In spite of the fact that this strips away the mythological nature of the work and heightens the sense of secrecy, undoubtedly the painting is in tune with the viewer's joint desire for nature and the woman. Courbet later created a number of other works, as here, depicting nude women lying on beds before windows. (Source: Masterpieces of the National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo, 2009, cat. no.63)