KEITH CHRISTIANSEN: Gustave Courbet had already shocked the art world with his depictions of such trivial subjects as a rural funeral and stonemasons. So when he exhibited a nude woman playing with a parrot at the Salon of 1866, many critics found it to be more tasteful and elegant than they had actually expected. It fit within an established genre. Still, it was hardly a run-of-the-mill salon nude. Alison Hokanson.

ALISON HOKANSON: He takes us out of this noble realm of the idealized female nude into the realm of a specific, ordinary individual—the way that we get a glimpse of the woman's teeth; the way her hair snakes onto the sheets, and we can see these little strands sticking to her forehead; and then in the right corner, where we can see her skirt with the white waistband. And then also how he's used these very delicate flesh tones over her thighs and over her stomach to really give a sense of this fully rounded, living, breathing body.

KEITH CHRISTIANSEN: It was this sort of realism—not to mention the implied eroticism—that marked Courbet as one of the most controversial artists in nineteenth-century France. Even after thirty years, when the painting was brought to New York, it retained the power to provoke and to astonish.

ALISON HOKANSON: The donor, Louisine Havemeyer, who bought the work in 1898, 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."