Woman with a Parrot, by Steven Fraccaro

Woman with a Parrot, by Gustav Courbet (France) 1866

Woman with a Parrot
 
The painting is still shocking, after nearly two centuries. The woman’s flesh, her voluptuousness, her expression, the bird, astonishing in a way nothing is astonishing anymore. Erotic, not necessarily pornographic. There are Titian's Venuses, Olympia, Psyche, Leda. What is it that makes this more erotic? Beauty and strangeness. Whether we are men, women, or anyone else, the woman in the painting is not for us.  It’s easy to imagine certain viewers in nineteenth century Paris, male viewers, who simply took the image in, thought it a pleasant nude, wanted to meet the model, but they would have been fools. A woman who loves only women once told me, she wanted to run her fingers over the painting, kiss it. She was an artist. 
 
Despite rejoinders to the contrary, it would be easy to regard this as a mythological subject, as there are numerous stories of women and birds in Greek mythology. The painter Courbet never made that claim. There is a timelessness to the image. What did the woman do before this moment? What did she do afterwards? In the background we see swirling dark drapery. She lies on a white sheet, which may be a painter’s drop cloth. No one else is present. Her hair is wild, voluminous, spread out beneath her head like a mass of what, seaweed perhaps. 
 
No doubt there are twenty-first century feminists who dislike the painting. Louisine Havemeyer was a nineteenth- and early twentieth century feminist who fought for women’s suffrage. It was Mrs. Havemeyer who insisted that her reluctant husband purchase the work. It would be interesting to have seen the painting on the wall in their house on Fifth Avenue, particularly when guests were present. “I begged Mr. Havemeyer to buy the picture. Not to hang it in our gallery lest the anti-nudists should declare a revolution and revise our constitution, but just to keep it in America, just that such a work should not be lost...”
 
The male gaze, the female gaze. Mythology from a story that doesn’t exist, that we then invent. Perhaps the museum should add a warning, an admonition not to leap to conclusions. 
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Steven Fraccaro

Steven Fraccaro is the author of two novels, Dark Angels and Gainsborough’s Revenge, as well as of a book of essays, The Recalcitrant Scrivener. His most recent book is Skeleton Keys, published by Chax Press in 2023, a hybrid work intended to inhabit the space between poetry and prose, fiction and nonfiction. His piece on The Ambassadors by Hans Holbein appeared in The Ekphrastic Review in January 2019.