On the Seawalla community gallery of new writing, art and commentary hosted by Ron Slate

Four Visits to an Unfinished Canvas by Gustave Courbet, Once Painted Over

 

 

1.

Unhappy with death, someone

painted over it, was told

                  to paint over it, was hired to turn a corpse

into a bride, so as to

game the sale, like

who would buy No

when you could buy Yes, a corpse

was meat but a bride

was a promise

 

about to be kept — “Interestingly,

 

the iconography

                  has been interpreted

as both a wake and a marriage,” and for certain girls it must have

felt the same,

wedding veil and

winding sheet —

 

That anyone could buy this scene

                  as celebration —

 

That anyone could think to wive

                  this limp

 

                  girl —

 

2.

In Gustave Courbet’s La Toilette de la Morte —

 

(Known for a time as La Toilette de la Mariée)

 

In the epic scale reserved for kings, he painted

 

a soup tureen —

 

Something that looked like a pile of flowers —

 

The crescent arms of efficient girls — in

 

sweeping curves — on

 

diagonal lines — He painted

 

a curtained bed, a set of stairs, a window ledge —

 

where living girls leaned, looking out —

 

 

3.

And later, when someone

 

painted in a mirror, to show the dead girl

her revised

 

face —

 

Not quite a bride and not quite a corpse, I stood

looking in the gallery,

 

woman at fifty —

 

 

4.

So much tenderness and work-a-day

focus in the thirteen

young women in Courbet’s

canvas, preparing

to tend the living while

 

tending the dead —

 

Did he leave the canvas unfinished because

her promise was unfinished —

 

To leave the lives

of the living girls

 

as canvas left unfinished —

 

“Fine art is knowledge made visible,”

Courbet said —

Death

 

is everyone’s bride.

 

 

Gustave Courbet, Preparation of the Dead Girl, ca. 1850-1855, oil on canvas. Purchased with the Drayton Hillyer Fund, Smith College Museum of art, Northampton, Massachusetts, SC 1929.1. The image of the painting appears here with the permission of Smith College Museum of Art.

“Four Visits to an Unfinished Canvas by Gustave Courbet, Once Painted Over” was commissioned by the Poetry Center at Smith College and will appear this fall in the ekphrastic anthology The Map of Every Lilac Leaf: Poets Respond to the Smith College Museum of Art.