Head of a Woman and Flowers

Head of a Woman and Flowers, painted in 1871 and held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, was produced during the tumultuous year of the Paris Commune, in which Courbet played a significant role as a cultural administrator before his subsequent arrest. Despite the upheaval of that year, Courbet continued to paint — this combination of female portraiture and flower still life belonging to a more intimate, commercial vein of his production that ran alongside his major social and landscape subjects throughout his career. Floral paintings and portraits of women allowed Courbet to work in formats that were commercially viable and that demonstrated his mastery of close observation and painterly sensuousness without making the political statements that brought him such notoriety. The pairing of a female head with flowers also carries a tradition within European painting connecting female beauty with natural floral imagery.

Oil on canvas, this work combines two of Courbet's competences in a single composition: his ability to render human physiognomy with honest directness, and his command of floral painting in which each petal and leaf is observed as a specific material object. The overall palette is warmer and more chromatic than his landscape work, the flowers introducing reds and yellows that enliven the composition.