Born in 1866, the "Origin of the World" appeared to the general public at the Orsay Museum only in 1995, for more than a hundred years the public could not pass the stage of accepting its real origin)

It took even longer to establish the identity of the model, Constance Kenye. The customer was her lover, Khalil Bey, a Turkish dialomath in Paris. By the way, the letters of Dumas Jr. helped in this. The French historian Claude Schopp discovered an excerpt from his letter to Sand, dated June 1871: "It is impossible to convey with a brush the delicate and vivid interview of Mademoiselle Kenyo from the Opera." Shoppe checked the original handwritten correspondence and found that Dumas actually wrote "inside" instead of the word "interview".

There is already a plot for the novel in general, but that's not all).

In addition to the fact that Kenye fought for the attention of the Turk with Marie-Anne Detourbe, who later became the Comtesse de Loin, the path of the painting itself to the museum deserves a separate film adaptation.

Below are portraits of the faces of both ladies, it would be great if Marie-Anne also had a second portrait for comparative equality

The path of the painting.

- After the death of the Turk, the collection was sold out, the painting was lost.

- in 1889, one of the Goncourt brothers, writers, found a landscape in an antique shop, behind which an indecent Courbet painting was hidden.(the landscape was also painted by Courbet and depicted a winter scene and is now in the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts)

- in 1910, two new owners, Herzog and Hatvani, took the "Origin of the World" exactly to where, according to official data, it was lost at the end of World War II. Obviously, it was then that the paintings were divided and divided between the two owners.

- The landscape came to the Budapest Museum from the collection of More Lipot Herzog in 1959. The "Origin of the World" surfaced on the market earlier, in 1955, it was taken away from Budapest by Ferenc de Hatwani and later sold.

- The next owner was the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and he also asked his brother-in-law, the avant-garde Andre Masson, to cover up this shame.

The shapes of Masson's landscape completely repeated the contours of Courbet's painting, but someone unfamiliar with the scandalous canvas could not guess this.

"Dr. Lacan only showed it to his friends. It hung in his country house in Guitrancourt.

-Suddenly, in 1967, the painting was reproduced in Dr. Zwang's book "The Sex of a Woman" (before that, no one even knew what it looked like, they only knew from the texts that it was obscene). The anonymous photographer's unique photograph then continues to be reproduced with conflicting information about her whereabouts, either in Paris or Budapest.

- Lacan died in 1981. Finally, in 1982, a French actor told on television that he had seen Lacan's "Origin of the World" hidden behind a landscape by Masson.

- After Lacan's death, Courbet's painting went to his widow Sylvia.

- Sylvia died in 1995, and only then did the "Origin of the World" from her heirs, on account of taxes, get into the Orsay Museum.


Drawing on the Anshort tattoo