Young Ladies of the Village

In a valley near the artist’s hometown of Ornans, three well-dressed young women pause on a country path; one offers food to a poor girl tending cows, with a few cattle and a small dog nearby and steep limestone cliffs behind. The three women are Gustave Courbet’s sisters. Courbet, leader of French Realism, insisted on painting only the real life he could see, rejecting idealized history and mythology. When the large canvas was shown at the Paris Salon of 1852 it drew criticism: reviewers mocked the figures as awkward and out of proportion and objected to such grand scale for ordinary rural life. Today it is regarded as a major work of Realism.