The Origin of the World: the mysterious naked Courbet discovered 150 years ago

The scandal has never been far from Gustave Courbet's Histoire de Monde, one of the most provocative works in the history of art representing the genitals and torso of a naked woman.

However, a French scholar may have solved the mystery of his body so explicitly painted in his work of 1866, and was not exposed in public before 1995.

The subject of Courbet's work has for years been supposed to be his Irish lover.

But the woman that we think today is the dancer Constance Queniaux.

Attention: graphic content in Courbet painting below

The French literary expert Claude Schopp came across his discovery during a correspondence between two writers, George Sand and the son of Alexandre Dumas.

Who was Constance Queniaux?

Queniaux had retired as a ballet dancer to the Paris Opera in 1859 and at the age of 34, she was mistress of the Turkish-Egyptian diplomat Halil Sherif Pasha.

Later, she became a woman in any way, given to philanthropic work. We see her dressed in the pictures at the top left and bottom left of the picture below,

Known as Khalil Bey, the diplomat who commissioned The Origin of the World kept him in his dressing room behind a green curtain, revealing Courbet's painting to visitors and dinner guests.

The former dancer is mentioned in a letter from Dumas. Not only is his name misspelled, but a word was incorrectly transcribed in the following line: "We do not paint the most delicate and the most sonorous interview Miss Queniault of the Opera. "

Schopp was intrigued by the word interview, so he consulted the original manuscript of the National Library of France dating from June 1871 and found the error.

Dumas had written about Madame Queniaux's delicate and sound "inside" rather than the interview, leading Schopp to deduce that Dumas was writing about the painting.

And that was not all. Having shared her discovery with Sylvie Aubenas at the library, she was convinced that he was right.

On the death of Mrs. Queniaux in 1908, she bequeathed a Courbet painting of a bouquet of spring flowers and red and white camellias.

The camellias were the most identified flowers to courtesans, and Aubenas told the AFP news agency that she thought the painting was a gift from Courbet and her Ottoman boss.

Courbet's painting is still considered so risky that Facebook closed the account of a French teacher when he published a photo.

Who else from Courbet could have painted?

Khalil Bey also had links with courtesan Marie-Anne Detourbay, and some have already suggested that she was the woman in the painting.

Many argued that the woman was the lover of Courbet, the Irish model Joanna Hiffernan, although her hair color was red rather than that of the Origin of the World. Hiffernan was also romantically linked to the painter James Whistler.

In 2013, the French art expert, Jean-Jacques Fernier, said that he thought that an unsigned painting of a woman's head had been cut off from Courbet's work. But there was no recorded evidence that Courbet's work had ever been cut in half.