Woman with a Parrot

Painted in 1866 and now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, this sensuous figure study of a reclining woman with a parrot was exhibited at the 1866 Salon alongside the scandalous 'Sleep' and 'L'Origine du monde,' making 1866 an extraordinary year for Courbet's explicitly erotic output. The parrot as companion to a nude woman was a well-established European motif encoding ideas about communication, desire, and pet-keeping, and Courbet would have been aware of precedents in Dutch seventeenth-century painting as well as contemporary French academic nudes. The Metropolitan's holding of this work alongside other major Courbets makes New York one of the principal sites for studying his engagement with the female nude.

The parrot's vivid tropical plumage — greens, reds, and blues — provided Courbet with an opportunity for concentrated color intensity against the warm neutral tones of the nude figure. The bird is painted with ornithological precision, its feathers individually described. The reclining figure demonstrates his mature command of the female body at rest, with the characteristic weight-distribution of observed rather than posed anatomy.