The Sleepers Paris Tried to Hide
A painting so scandalous it was locked away for over a century — commissioned by an Ottoman diplomat and inspired by a poem about forbidden love.
In 1866, in a Paris studio, Gustave Courbet finished a canvas that would not be allowed to hang in public for 122 years. It showed two naked women asleep in bed, limbs entwined, their bodies rendered with the same unflinching realism Courbet applied to rock and flesh alike. He called it Le Sommeil — Sleep — though it would also become known as The Two Friends and Indolence and Lust.
The painting was commissioned by Halil Şerif Paşa, a Turkish diplomat and art collector of the late Ottoman era who had settled in Paris after 1860. He was a man of considerable appetite for the transgressive; Courbet's equally notorious L'Origine du monde was made for the same patron. Le Sommeil was never accepted for exhibition in respectable Parisian venues of the time, and remained officially unshowable until 1988.
In 1872, a picture dealer dared to display the work, and the exhibition became the subject of a police report — proof of how dangerous the image was considered even six years after its completion.
One of the two models was Joanna Hiffernan, an Irish woman who was at the time the mistress of the American-born painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler, a friend and rival of Courbet's. Soon after the painting was made, Whistler and Hiffernan's relationship ended, and Whistler's friendship with Courbet soured along with it — a quiet human cost behind a canvas remembered mostly for its audacity.
The scene itself is spare and intimate: a bedroom with dark blue velvet curtains, a table bearing a flower vase in one corner, and in the foreground a smaller table holding a colored flacon, a crystal vase, and a cup. Little else competes with the two women — one redhead, one brunette — whose contrasting coloring Courbet used to trace curves between their bodies. A broken pearl necklace and a stray hairpin scattered on the sheets hint wordlessly at what came before the sleep.
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