That's who the model in Courbet's Origine du monde was: French historian announces he has solved the mystery

French historian Claude Schopp today announced that he has found the key to solving one of the most curious mysteries in art history: theidentity of the model who posed for Gustave Courbet ’sOrigine du Monde (Ornans, 1819 - La Tour-de-Peilz, 1877), the celebrated 1866 painting, preserved at the Muséand d’Orsay in Paris, which depicts, with extreme precision, a woman’s genitals exposed without any filter to the viewer’s eye, and which in recent times has hit the headlines for a Facebook censorship case that has reached the courts.

Schopp, a literary historian and Dumas specialist (in 2017, a book he wrote on Dumas’ son won him the Goncourt Prize for biography), thinks that it was Constance Quéniaux, a dancer at the Paris Opéra, who posed for Courbet, and says his hypothesis is supported on a documentary basis. In particular, Schopp has been working on the correspondence between Alexandre Dumas son and the writer George Sand, and in particular argues that the “solution” to the mystery is contained in a letter that Dumas son sent to Sand in June 1871, in which Courbet himself was mentioned. In the transcript of the manuscript preserved in the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), one could read the phrase “on ne peint pas de son pinceau le plus délicat et le plus sonore l’interview de Mlle Queniault [sic] de l’Opéra” (“one does not paint with his brush the most delicate and sonorous interview of Mlle. Quéniaux of the Opéra”).

Schopp, realizing that the word “interview” in the context made no sense, wanted to check the manuscript thoroughly, and realized that Dumas, in fact, had not written “interview” but “intérieur”: according to the historian, the phrase thus reread would become a clear allusion to the French dancer’s genitals, and it is therefore possible to assume that it was she who posed for the great French painter. “It was like an enlightenment,” Schopp told Agence France-Presse. “I often make discoveries by working hard, but here I found without looking.” The scholar then discussed his discovery with Sylvie Aubenas, director of the prints and photographs department at the BnF. Who welcomes Schopp’s hypothesis: “This testimony discovered by Claude makes me say,” said Aubenas, “that we have 99 percent certainty that Courbet’s model was Constance Quéniaux.”

But there is more: the hypothesis, Schopp goes on to explain, is also strengthened by the name of the painting’s first owner (as well as its probable patron), the Turkish-Egyptian diplomat Khalil Bey (Cairo, 1831 - Istanbul, 1879), one of the most volcanic figures in Paris in the 1860s. At the time, Constance Quéniaux was thirty-four years old, had not danced for six, and had become one of the mistresses of the Ottoman diplomat, a year her senior. In fact, other scholars had already speculated in the past that the genitals painted by Courbet belonged to one of Khalil-Bey’s mistresses, who had a reputation as a tombeur de femmes: in 2011, historian Gérard Desanges had named Jeanne de Tourbey, an animator of a literary circle. When asked why Constance’s name was not circulated earlier, Aubenas responds by arguing that, in the circles of the time, the identity of Courbet’s model was something of an open secret, and the fact that Dumas wanted to put her name on paper in clear letters was probably due to the fact that there was bad blood between him and Courbet. And then this “secret known to all,” as Aubenas called it, would be lost after Quéniaux became in time a respectable lady of French high society, particularly active in the field of philanthropy.

Pictured: Gustave Courbet, L’origine du monde (1866; oil on canvas, 46 x 55 cm; Paris, Musée d’Orsay)

That's who the model in Courbet's Origine du monde was: French historian announces he has solved the mystery

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