The Source

The Source, painted in 1862 by Gustave Courbet, presents a reclining female nude beside a woodland spring, a subject that deliberately invokes centuries of academic tradition even as Courbet's characteristically dense, physical brushwork and unidealized flesh pushed hard against that same tradition's polished conventions. Courbet, the great provocateur of French Realism, painted the nude not as timeless allegory but as tangible, weighted body.

Coming just a few years after his notorious "The Painter's Studio" and amid ongoing battles with the Salon jury over what counted as acceptable subject matter, this canvas shows Courbet working within a classical theme — the female figure at a spring, echoing Ingres's own famous treatment of the subject — while insisting on his own uncompromising realism of texture and form.

Held in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, this masterwork is presented here as a premium stretched canvas reproduction, printed on museum-quality matte canvas and hand-wrapped around a solid 0.75-inch gallery wrap frame — ready to hang and built to last.