''La Femme au perroquet'' (''Woman with a Parrot'') is an oil painting on canvas by French artist

Gustave Courbet Jean Désiré Gustave Courbet ( , , ; 10 June 1819 – 31 December 1877) was a French painter who led the Realism movement in 19th-century French painting. Committed to painting only what he could see, he rejected academic convention and ...

. It was the first nude by the artist to be accepted by the Paris Salon in 1866 after a previous entry in 1864 was rejected as indecent. It is in the collection of the

Metropolitan Museum of Art The Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City, colloquially "the Met", is the largest art museum in the Americas. Its permanent collection contains over two million works, divided among 17 curatorial departments. The main building at 1000 ...

in New York city.

Description

The painting shows a woman reclining on her back, with a pet parrot alighting on an outstretched hand. While painted in a style to gain Academy acceptance in its pose and smooth flesh tones, the model's discarded clothes and disheveled hair were controversial, although less so than ''

Le Sommeil ''Le Sommeil'' (translated in English variously as ''The Sleepers'' and ''Sleep'') is an eroticDorothy M. KosinskiGustave Courbet's ''The Sleepers.'' The Lesbian Image in Nineteenth Century French Art and Literature Artibus et Historiae, Vol. 9, N ...

'', painted the same year.

Joanna Hiffernan Joanna Hiffernan (1843 – 1886) or Joanna Heffernan was an Irish artists' model and muse who was romantically linked with American painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler and French painter Gustave Courbet. In addition to being an artists' ...

likely posed for both paintings, as she did for others by Courbet. The work is on view in the Metropolitan Museum's Gallery 811.

References

External links

''Europe in the age of enlightenment and revolution''
a catalog from The Metropolitan Museum of Art Libraries (fully available online as PDF), which contains material on ___ (see index) {{19C-painting-stub Paintings by Gustave Courbet 1866 paintings Paintings in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art Nude art Birds in art