The model who posed for Gustave Courbet’s L'Origine du Monde
(Origin of the World) was most likely French ballet dancer Constance Queniaux. The canvas was commissioned by an Ottoman diplomat for his erotica collection
Source: PHÉBUS/BBC/TUT.by
Art historians thought for decades that the model in one of the world’s most scandalous artworks, Gustave Courbet’s L'Origine du Monde, was Irish Joanna Hiffernan. She is believed to be the artist’s lover and was romantically linked to American painter James Whistler, Courbet’s student, TUT.by reports with a link to BBC News.
However, experts doubted that the naked body and genitals in L'Origine du Monde belonged to Hiffernan, because the model’s pubic hair is dark while Hiffernan’s hair colour was red.
The evidence that the model was French ballet dancer Constance Queniaux, not the Irish woman, was found in correspondence between two French writers, the son of Alexandre Dumas and George Sand. The discovery was made by French literary expert Claude Schopp who studied the writers’ letters.
In particular, Schopp was puzzled by a passage in Dumas’s letter to Sand dating back to June 1871: “One does not paint the most delicate and the most sonorous interview of Miss Queniault of the Opera.” Schopp consulted the handwritten original and figured out Dumas had really written “interior”, not “interview”.
The expert shared his discovery with Sylvie Aubenas, head of the French National Library’s prints department. “This testimony from the time leads me to believe with 99% certainty that Courbet’s model was Constance Queniaux,” she said.
French Realist painter Gustave Courbet created the painting L'Origine du Monde in 1866. It depicts a naked woman with her legs spread. It is is one of the most scandalous paintings in art history that had not been displayed publicly until 1995 due to its explicitly.
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