The origin of The Origin…

Major partners of the Paris Opera’s 350th anniversary

Major partners of
the Paris Opera’s 350th anniversary

A suivre:

Abbé Perrin (Director of...

If, for more than a century, the identity of the woman who posed for Gustave Courbet’s notorious painting The Origin of the World remained a mystery, it was recently discovered that she was in fact a dancer, and more specifically, a dancer from the Paris Opera. It is thanks to the research of Claude Schopp that we can now put a name to one of the most famous nudes in the history of painting: Mademoiselle Constance Quéniaux. She entered the Opera as a dancer at the age of fourteen and apparently became the mistress of a Turkish-Egyptian diplomat by the name of Khalil-Bey, who also happened to be the painting’s first owner.