 Hey everybody, welcome to Barn's Takeout. My name is Martha Lucy. I'm Deputy Director for Research, Interpretation, and Education at the Barns. Today we're going to be looking at a painting by Gustave Courbet called Woman with Pigeons. It's right here in room 14. There it is. It was done in the, probably done in the mid-1860s. Now, a little bit about Courbet. He was a very provocative artist, one of the most controversial artists of the 19th century. He was the leader of the realist movement, which meant that he refused to depict mythological and historical subjects. No more painting people in togas, he said. He wanted to paint the people of his time, peasants, stone workers, laborers, and often in doing this, his work was very political. So he focused on contemporary life and truth and pretty realities. And that work was, the realist work was the late 1840s and 1850s. So this painting, Woman with Pigeon, was done later in the mid-1860s. And by this time, his work had become less political. He had started painting landscapes and portraits and lots of nudes and erotic scenes, paintings like The Origin of the World and the painting in the Barnes Collection of the Woman with the White Stocking. And one of his erotic nudes prominently featured a bird. It's called Woman with a Parrot, done in 1866 at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. And that painting, Woman with Parrot, was presented at the Salon of 1866 and it was very popular and very scandalous. The bird is perched on the finger of a reclining nude and her hair is sprawling all over the silky sheets behind her and the bird there seems to kinda, it helps create a feeling of sensuality and kind of wildness. And there's the evocation of the sense of touch created by the bird's claws. Okay, but for this painting, how do we understand this painting? This Woman with Pigeons? Is it another, is it a realist painting? Is it a scene from contemporary life? I think that yes, in a way, there is a tradition in European art of showing women in domestic interiors with birds, especially in the Dutch genre painting of the 17th century. There are birds all over the place in those paintings. You can see them in the background sometimes in cages and they are shown there by Dutch artists as sort of details of what ordinary life, what an interior of a household looked like, but they were also used by those artists in metaphorical ways. So a bird in a cage with the door closed meant that the woman's virginity was intact. And if the door was open, that meant something else. So we could see this painting by Courbet as kind of a continuation of the Dutch tradition. Is this a scene of everyday life, a woman with her birds? And that's very likely because pet keeping was popular in the 19th century. People kept birds as pets, and especially as the city modernized and there was this feeling of alienation, pet keeping became more and more common as a way of kind of bringing comfort and humanity into your life. This painting though, it doesn't fall very easily into that category of a realist painting. And I think that that's because we don't see a background. She's not in some domestic space where we think, oh, we're seeing a woman with her birds. It's also not an overtly erotic painting like the one that I just described of the reclining nude with the bird perched on her finger. And it also, it seems to sort of, it has the format of a portrait, but it's not quite a portrait either. And I think that this is what makes it such a strange and intriguing painting is the way that it kind of falls between categories. It sort of begs interpretation. And it's on the one hand, it feels like a straightforward painting of a woman with her pets, but on the other hand, it feels like it might have some sort of allegorical meaning. So let's look at what's going on here. This woman is holding two pigeons, one on her finger and the other, she's kind of clutching to her breast and she's holding, she's sort of looking at them protectively and fondly. She's gazing down. It's a warm picture. It's intimate. There's a slight smile on her face. She clearly likes these birds. But there's a difference in the way that she's holding these birds. One bird, she is holding firmly this one and clutching it kind of against her shoulder. The other one is simply kind of perched on her finger, but this one, you can see that she's applying some pressure just a little bit. There's this kind of indent there into the bird's feathers by her thumb. And then there are some interesting differences in the birds themselves. So this one, let's look closely at the birds. This one has a pink ribbon around its neck. This one does not. They have different markings, but even the way that they're painted, this one is more loosely rendered. The eye is sort of blurry. This eye is painted with clarity. You can see a little sparkle in it. And so it sort of feels like this bird is in motion and this one is static. And you get a sense that he is gendering these birds, that this is meant to be the female bird and this is the male bird. He's giving the female bird the more passive role. The male bird is in motion taking action. And I'll come back to this in a minute. The birds touch beaks, which of course evokes a kiss. And I think that you start to realize, or at least I did, what essential painting this is. So maybe it sort of is more in the category of the nude woman with the reclining nude with the bird on her finger. So here you've got this bear shoulder that's sort of lit up. You've got the evocation of touch with the bird's feathers against her bare skin. You've got these flushed cheeks, very pronounced. And so maybe she's thinking of her lover's kiss. Maybe this is some sort of allegory of love. I mean, we know that Corbet used birds as symbols of sexuality in other paintings. Compositionally, I think that he might be in this area making reference to the famous sculpture by Canova called Cupid and Psyche from 1787, which is at the Louvre. And in that sculpture, you have to look it up if you don't know what I'm talking about. Cupid is bending forward to revive Psyche with his kiss. And it's just that the composition is so similar. It has this sort of X structured composition and even the way that the bird's wings are lifted up, they mimic Cupid's wings in that sculpture. But then I think that what's also interesting in what might make this sort of an allegory of love and human love is the way that Corbet really does seem to want to equate this bird if we can accept that it's meant to be a female bird with the woman holding her. Look at the ribbons, ribbon around this bird, ribbon in her hair. Look at the eye even, you know? This round, brown eye with a shine on it seems to be picking up on that earring, but also the way that she's holding it close to her. She seems to sort of identify with it. She is the woman, the bird is the female in this situation. So that's my spin on this painting. I think it's fun to sort of think about it as a scene of everyday life, but also to think about it as maybe he's meaning for it to mean something else. I hope that you enjoyed this. Thank you for listening. I'm Tom Collins, New Bauer Family Executive Director of the Barnes Foundation. I hope you enjoyed Barnes Takeout. 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