The demurely dressed subject of Mère Grégoire was inspired by the lead character in a popular song written in the 1820s by French lyricist Pierre-Jean de Béranger. Béranger often penned ribald lyrics; his “Madame Grégoire” was the proprietor of a house of prostitution. Gustave Courbet began this work in 1855 as a simple head on a horizontal canvas, but enlarged it to its present dimensions and transformed it into an elaborate genre scene between 1857 and 1859. The artist depicted the woman here in the midst of a transaction, with coins scattered on a marble-topped counter and a ledger beneath her right hand. Under her other hand is the small bell used to summon her female employees. She holds a flower, a symbol of love, which she presumably offers to an unseen customer on the other side of the counter.

The painting may also have had a political subtext. Béranger was a fierce opponent of the monarchy, while Courbet followed in his footsteps as a dissident of the Second Empire. In the mid-1850s, when Courbet began this painting, the government had harshly attacked Béranger’s songs in an eff ort to restrict free expression. Courbet’s decision to portray the songwriter’s Madame Grégoire—whose flower exhibits the blue, white, and red of the French flag—may represent a protest not only against government censorship but also against the Second Empire itself. Thus the artist transformed the character into a heroine who embodies the rights to freedom in life and love that were forbidden under the repressive regime.

Courbet played a crucial role in the development of modern French painting as the leader of the Realist movement, which rejected Romanticism’s dramatic subjects and emotions in favor of portraying everyday people and events with truth and accuracy, warts and all. Critics and the public did not easily accept his large, naturalistic, and unsentimental depictions of commonplace, often rural subjects, earning him the nickname the “apostle of ugliness.”