The Artist’s Studio insists that the artist had to be at the throbbing centre of society and had to portray it honestly. As he explained in a letter to his art critic friend Champfleury, “friends, fellow workers and art lovers” are on the right, including Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Charles Baudelaire, and Champfleury himself, while, on the left, we see “the world of commonplace life”, including a merchant, a priest, and a beggar woman. All around, his studio is littered with characters that helped define the painter. His back is to a naked model and there is a young boy by his side, both fascinated by his skill and forming an Oedipal triangle with the artist. It follows perfectly from Courbet’s The Artist's Studio, a real allegory summing up seven years of my artistic and moral life (1854-55) in which Courbet portrays himself painting a landscape with his brush in mid-air. However, the painting goes beyond the autobiographical and is best viewed as a manifesto offering an allegory of sexual pleasure.

The story is appealing when considered alongside The Origin of the World: perhaps Courbet was destined to bring nature, woman, and art together in a powerful new way. It is said that his mother gave birth to him under an oak tree, on her way from Flagey to her parents’ home at Ornans.

Gustave Courbet was born on 10 June, 1819, in Ornans near Besançon in the French Jura and he died on 31 Decemin La Tour-de-Peilz in Switzerland. Where Courbet has been rightly viewed as a key painter in the birth of modern art, the time has come to appreciate just how much he revolutionised the long tradition of the female nude.

The painting has remained closely guarded by the Musée d’Orsay since its acquisition in 1995, and so the recent public and critical attention is long overdue. As the title confirms, Courbet pays homage to the origin of life and the world as we know it, but in the process he stages a call to arms for a radically new realism too. Courbet’s model is portrayed only by her vulva, her thighs parted so as to reveal vaginal lips, offset by black pubic hair, a white sheet, and the pink flesh of her lower breasts. Gustave Courbet’s The Origin of the World (1866) a painting of a woman’s “lower groin” (bas-ventre), as the writer Edmond de Goncourt coyly described it in June 1889, is as beautiful as it is brazen.

L'Origine du monde by Thierry Savatier