In the early 1850s, Julien Vallou de Villeneuve made a series of photographs of female nudes that he marketed as models for artists. These have long been associated with Gustave Courbet, who is known to have used photographs in his painting process. No closer relationship or more convincing proof can be found than that between this photograph and Courbet’s once scandalous 1853 painting The Bathers. The full-bodied model in Vallou’s photograph—identified as 34-year-old Henriette Bonnion—is known to have posed in the studio for Courbet, and the pose is strikingly similar to the figure in the painting.