The Woman in the Waves by Gustave Courbet

A woman raises both arms above her head as water breaks across her waist. Her body fills the canvas, but through the narrow gap to her right there is room for a whole stretch of sea, down to the tiny sails on the horizon. Gustave Courbet painted The Woman in the Waves (La Femme à la vague) in 1868. The oil on canvas measures 65.4 × 54 cm and belongs to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where its accession number is 29.100.62. Its compact, upright format brings a figure in rough water almost within reach. ^[1]

The arms and the turn of the head

The silhouette begins with the long diagonal of the nearer arm. It rises from the left and crosses above the forehead, close to the top of the canvas. The fingers of the farther hand hang over it, each catching a little light. Below that clasp, the head turns towards the right and tilts down. The gap beneath the arms is crowded with loose brown curls, and strands fall across the cheek. The bent arms form a kind of frame within the picture, with the face set off-centre. The forearm runs up towards the right, while the gaze falls in the same direction. ^[1]

The turn makes the face accessible even as the woman looks away. Her eyelids, the slight dip at the corner of the mouth and the shadow beneath the chin give the head a particular angle and weight. It is easy to read the lifted arms as a gesture of composure, but their position also exposes the body to the motion below. One hand rests over the opposite arm while the water runs unevenly across the waist. The hands and face suggest a pose that could be held. The foam suggests an instant that will pass. Much of the tension in the picture comes from being able to see both at once. ^[1]

Skin, foam and the distant sea

At the lower left, an upturned streak of foam meets the woman’s side. Across the centre, smaller blue-white touches scatter over warmer colour until it becomes hard to say where the outline of her body ends. A broken pale crest runs towards the right edge. Courbet varies the marks according to what the water is doing. Some are thin arcs at the edge of a wave, while others break up into flecks across the figure. Below them, dark greens and browns carry the movement in wider strokes. The body seems to occupy the same water that passes behind and in front of it. ^[1]

Look up from that crowded lower edge and the changes across the figure are slower. Cool tones on the forearm turn warmer around the elbow and at the base of the neck. A small patch of underarm hair is visible where the raised arm meets the chest. The Met singles it out as a departure from the idealised treatment of the female nude. The detail also belongs to the mechanics of the pose. It sits in the hollow opened by lifting the arm, alongside the turn of the shoulder and the shadow cast by the upper body. The painting asks us to notice how the figure is made visible through such particulars, as well as through its overall shape. ^[1]

The strongest contrast in scale occurs along the right edge of the torso. The water beside the woman is dark and uneven, while the distant sea narrows into a thin line beneath a low band of light. The sails are so small that they would be easy to overlook in a quick glance. Once seen, they pull the horizon far back and make the figure feel nearer still. The passage also changes the apparent setting. Beyond the waves around this one body, there is enough navigable water for boats to move across the distance. ^[1]

Courbet and Cabanel’s Venus

Five years earlier, Alexandre Cabanel showed The Birth of Venus at the Paris Salon of 1863. Napoleon III bought it for his private collection. The original is now at the Musée d’Orsay and is more than two metres wide. Cabanel’s Venus lies along the water, with one arm bent above her face as a row of winged figures arcs over her. The horizontal canvas makes space for her whole body and the figures in flight. The title names a story familiar from classical mythology, and the sea foam is part of that story. The Met also owns a smaller version that John Wolfe commissioned from Cabanel in 1875. The comparison with Courbet begins with the painting shown in 1863. ^{[2] [3] [4]}

The Met reads Courbet’s painting as an evocation of Venus’s birth. Both poses bring a forearm close to the forehead, and both figures are framed by the sea. Yet their relation to it looks different. Cabanel’s figure stretches across the wave and seems borne by it. Courbet’s upright figure interrupts the horizon, and the wave breaks into separate marks where it meets her. Cabanel’s smooth figure and the sweep of his composition carry the eye along the body. Courbet repeatedly catches the eye on the way down, at the overlapping hands, the curls and the uneven meeting of water and waist. His title calls her a woman, leaving the possible connection with Venus for the viewer to make. ^{[1] [2]}

The difference is especially clear at the faces. Cabanel’s goddess rests her head back, and her bent arm shelters her eyes. Courbet turns the face towards a part of the picture with no other figure to return her look. The tilted head and gathered arms give the woman a concentration of her own. In a scene that has so much exposed skin, the eyes provide one detail the spectator cannot meet directly. ^{[1] [2]}

The model and the painting’s public life

The Met places this work within a group of female nudes Courbet painted from 1864 to 1868. The National Gallery of Art’s catalogue for A Young Woman Reading proposes that the model in that painting also appears in The Woman in the Waves and in the principal figure of Three Bathers. It is a comparison of painted likenesses, and the sitter’s name remains uncertain. The Met’s 2008 retrospective included nineteenth-century photographs alongside Courbet’s paintings and discussed a photograph by Julien Vallou de Villeneuve with a pose close to the standing figure in The Bathers. That comparison concerns the earlier painting of 1853. It shows how a pose might circulate between media, while the likeness proposed for the 1868 figure is evidence of a different kind. ^{[1] [5] [6] [7]}

The 1868 picture also had a public life beyond the studio. The Musée du Luxembourg records that it was sent to the Brussels Salon in 1872 and was at Paul Durand-Ruel’s gallery by early 1873. Courbet considered including it in a projected retrospective in Vienna, and the dealer sent it to the city that April, probably for a different exhibition of French painting. The gallery included an etched reproduction in a publication in 1874. By the time Durand-Ruel sold the canvas to Henry and Louisine Havemeyer in 1893, the composition had thus reached viewers in more than one form. It entered the Met through Louisine Havemeyer’s bequest in 1929. In 2015 the Met lent it to a Philadelphia Museum of Art exhibition about Durand-Ruel. ^{[1] [8] [9]}

Which Courbet painting is which?

The Bathers at the Musée Fabre is a much larger picture in which two women exchange gestures at a wooded pool. Philadelphia’s Nude Reclining by the Sea, painted in the same year as The Woman in the Waves, is a closer comparison in subject. There the reclining body extends across the picture, with the sea behind it. In the Met canvas, the tight crop and the foaming water across the waist are the quickest ways to identify the scene. ^{[1] [7] [10]}

The similar title The Wave leads to a seascape, the Musée d’Orsay’s La Mer orageuse, which Courbet exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1870. In that wide canvas, the advancing wave dominates the view and the boats on shore help establish its size. In the 1868 painting, the boats are far out to sea and the water’s movement registers against the body. The little strip of horizon is enough to give the figure a setting, while the water across her waist brings the sea right up to the foreground. ^{[1] [11]}