Sleeping Harvester, copy after Jean François de Troy

Courbet's early career included several copies after Old Master paintings, a conventional training exercise he undertook while teaching himself to paint largely outside the official École des Beaux-Arts system. This 1845 copy after Jean-François de Troy's Sleeping Harvester, now at the Otani Memorial Art Museum in Nishinomiya City, Japan, reflects the young Courbet absorbing the compositional and technical lessons of eighteenth-century French painting. De Troy (1679–1752) was a leading painter of the Regency and early Rococo period, known for his genre scenes and conversation pieces, and his sleeping harvester subject offered Courbet a study in relaxed figural naturalism that aligned with his own emerging interests. The act of copying was pedagogical — Courbet worked in the Louvre copying Velázquez, Hals, Rembrandt, and Van Dyck alongside French masters. That this early copy survives in a Japanese museum reflects the extraordinary international dispersal of works from Courbet's studio and early market.

An early copy would show Courbet still learning to match another painter's surface qualities — de Troy's smoother, lighter Rococo handling would have been technically demanding for an artist naturally inclined toward heavier impasto. The exercise required disciplined subordination of his own emerging style to the source's different material language.