The Sleepers

A private commission

In 1866 Gustave Courbet painted The Sleepers, also called Le Sommeil (Sleep), for Khalil-Bey, the Ottoman diplomat and collector in Paris who also commissioned L'Origine du monde. The painting shows two women asleep on a bed, their bodies entwined. Like L'Origine du monde, it was meant for a private collection and could not have been shown at the official Salon.

The subject recalls the poems of Charles Baudelaire, a friend of Courbet, and the theme of the nude in the work of artists from Titian to Ingres, but Courbet treated it with the frank, unidealised realism that defined his art.

Realism and the nude

Courbet painted the two figures with warm, solid flesh tones, one fair-haired and one dark-haired, against the white sheets and dark blue background. The painting is less about narrative than about the beauty of the bodies, the textures of skin, hair and fabric, and the stillness of sleep.

The still life

Around the bed, Courbet painted a luxurious still life. A crystal carafe and a glass stand on a small table at the lower left, and a vase of flowers rests on a side table in the background. A broken pearl necklace and a hair comb lie scattered on the bed, suggesting the passing of the night.

Detail 1Zoom to detail

Detail 2Zoom to detail

A hidden painting

After Khalil-Bey's ruin in 1868, the painting passed through private collections and was long considered too scandalous to be exhibited publicly. It was bought by the City of Paris in 1953 for the Petit Palais, where it hangs today among the museum's collection of nineteenth-century French painting.

Courbet's place in art

The Sleepers shows Courbet's skill as a painter of the nude and of still life, and his refusal to hide behind mythological pretexts. It influenced later artists, from the Impressionists to modern painters, in their frank approach to the human body. Because of the nature of the subject, this guide includes only details of the still life.

The painting measures about 1.35 by 2 metres.

Courbet and the nude

Courbet painted many nudes in the 1860s, and they were among his most commercially successful works, bought by private collectors who appreciated their realism and sensuality. He approached the female body as he approached landscapes and animals: with careful observation of texture, weight and light, without the idealisation of the academic nude. In The Sleepers, the richness of the setting, the deep blue background, the white sheets, the porcelain vase and the crystal glass, shows his skill as a still-life painter as much as a painter of figures. The painting also reflects the literary culture of Paris in the 1860s, when poets like Baudelaire explored themes that official morality condemned. Today it is valued as a key work in the history of the modern nude.