Woman with a Parrot, Gustave Courbet (c. 1866)

Woman with a Parrot, Gustave Courbet (1866) Gustave Courbet’s Woman with a Parrot scandalized Paris when it debuted at the Salon of 1866. The French Realist master presents a reclining nude, hair unbound, clothes discarded, and a parrot perched playfully above her—a vision that defied the sanitized idealism of academic nudes. Where Alexandre Cabanel’s Birth of Venus embodied mythic beauty, Courbet’s model was disheveled, sensual, and unmistakably real. The painting provoked outrage from critics, yet found champions among progressive voices who saw it as a challenge to convention. Courbet’s muse and lover Joanna Hiffernan is thought to have posed for the figure, her casual pose and natural beauty celebrated as “a woman of our time.” The parrot—an exotic symbol often linked to eroticism—adds a note of provocation, heightening the work’s audacious modernity. Though controversial, Woman with a Parrot influenced the next generation of painters, inspiring Manet and captivating Cézanne. Today