Woman with Parrot by Gustave Courbet was received at the 1866 Paris Salon with only relative approval.

Before Woman with Parrot was painted in 1866, Courbet had created an even more scandalous painting in order to test just how crazy he could get before the hyper-conservative Salon deemed him vulgar or tasteless or whatever the snooty academics of the 19th century were calling overt nudity at the time. This painting was Venus and Psyche, and it was submitted to the Salon in 1864. It depicted “a masculine-looking brunette [leaning] with an equivocal expression (hatred? lust?) over a sumptuous, sleeping blonde.” The sleeping girl, Psyche, is in a position almost identical to that of the woman in Woman with Parrot. The difference between the two was the other naked woman. The Salon could handle one nude, but two? No way. A stockbroker bought the painting, but insisted that Courbet add a white cockatoo, which apparently is a symbol of male sexuality. He couldn’t have just left the patriarchy out of it… The painting, unsubtle cock-atoo reference and all, was destroyed in an air raid in Berlin in 1945. But by then it had already done its job of making Woman with Parrot relatively modest.

Woman with Parrot “presents a nearly exact repetition of the Psyche figure, only awake and alone, blissfully smiling, with the eponymous fowl.” It was submitted to the 1866 Paris Salon and it wasn’t rejected, though it met with harsh criticism. It was more tasteful than they had expected but people were still scandalized by the woman’s “blatant sexuality,” “ungainly pose,” and "disheveled hair." They just couldn’t get around the fact that prior to this painting it was maybe possible that she might have been engaging in intercourse out of wedlock, which was just a huge no-no. The fact is that she probably was getting it on as this woman is likely Joanna Hiffernan, Courbet’s (and Whistler’s) muse and lover. She wasn’t a goddess or a nymph and therefore her nudity was frowned upon. Tolerated… but frowned upon. The parrot, identified as a blue-fronted Amazon parrot, doesn’t help matters either as it “[embodies] both the exotic and the erotic.”

This painting stands the test of time, however. Louisine Havemeyer, who initially bought the work, had the sense of what it would become. She recalled, “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 to the future generations.” She was well ahead of her time, obviously. As was Manet, who immediately began working on his own version of the painting, and Cézanne, who apparently kept a photo of the work in his pocket.