The Sleepers

The Sleepers (Le Sommeil)
Artist: Gustave Courbet
Oil painting on canvas; Size: 135x200cm; Petit Palais, Paris.

The Sleepers by Courbet was painted in 1866, had been commissioned by Khalil Bey, a 'British diplomat who had assembled an important collection, including paintings by Delacroix, Chasseriau, Corot and Ingres. In this collection, dispersed in 1868 after Bey was declared bankrupt, particular emphasis was given to erotic themes: it was to the same Turkish diplomat that Ingres had sold The Turkish Bath, returned to him by Prince Napoleon and transformed into a tondo.
We can place The Sleepers in the category that the writer and art critic Champfleury defined as "elegant nudity," a type of production that had surfaced in the 1860s and to which Courbet occasionally devoted himself in just that decade. The picture originally had a companion piece, The Awakening (1866, Petit Palais, Paris); together, the paintings represented the love of women for women, at least as it was understood by men who painted for other men.
The sensuality and physicality of the figures transform the academic nude into a frankly erotic subject that is fully in keeping with the work of an artist who was accustomed to controversy over his choice of subjects. At the time, in fact, nudes were often disguised as mythological scenes and met with the favor of the critics as well as the public. In 1863 Alexandre Cabanel had exhibited his The Birth of Venus (Musee d'Orsay, Paris, 1863) at the Salon, and this roguishly idealized nude was appreciated by Napoleon III, who bought the painting and made its author a knight of the Legion of Honor.