Le Sommeil
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Le Sommeil (1866) is a painting by French artist Gustave Courbet. Paintings showing two or more females together seldom displayed much in the way of potential sexual activity between them. When it came to nudity, most women subjects were depicted as dancers or bathers, usually stated as goddesses.
Two that do stand out include Gustave Courbet's Sleep which openly depicts two women asleep after love-making (indicated by the broken pearl necklace); and Dominique Ingres' Turkish Bath in which, in the foreground, one woman can be seen with an arm around another and pinching her breast. Both these paintings ended up in the collection of erotica collector and diplomat Khalil Bey, but are now exhibited in the Metropolitan Museum of Art respectively.
