In 1854, Gustave Courbet wrote to his friend and patron, Alfred Bruyas, asking him to send a photograph of a nude woman that the two had previously discussed, because he wanted to include her in the composition of his major canvas, “The Painter’s Studio.” A decade later, when he painted “L’Origine du Monde” (1866), which shows a cropped (and highly detailed) view of a woman’s nude torso and nether regions, Courbet may have again worked from a photograph, one from a pornographic series by Auguste Belloc.

Discussions about the relationship between paintings and photography sometimes make art historians and curators nervous, as though any resemblance means that a painter “copied” a photograph. But a major exhibition of Courbet opening Wednesday at the Metropolitan Museum of Art draws specific attention to the relationship between his style and photography, which underwent major advances during his youth and early career. As the exhibition shows, Courbet (1819–77) was one of the first painters to absorb the new medium’s stylistic and technical potential.

One of the co-curators of the exhibition, a curator at the Musée d’Orsay, Dominique de Font-Réaulx, said in an interview that Courbet interacted with his contemporaries in photography in multiple ways — beginning with his enthusiasm for having his own paintings photographed.

Before the invention of photography, the only way to reproduce paintings was through etchings. Photography obviously offered a much more accurate means of reproduction, and Courbet seems to have eagerly embraced it. The critic Théophile Silvestre’s 1853 book, “Histoire des artistes vivants,” included photographs of Courbet paintings, as well as a photographic portrait of the painter himself by Victor Laisné. (Courbet later had portraits done by Félix Nadar and others.) In 1855, Courbet sought to have all of his paintings in the Pavilion of Realism, outside the Exposition Universelle, photographed for a catalog, Ms. de Font-Réaulx said. He was disappointed with the results, though, so the catalog was never realized.

In terms of style and subject matter, the closest connection to photography is in Courbet’s landscapes and his nudes. The resemblance between Courbet’s paintings of nude women and photographs by Belloc and others such as Julien Vallou de Villeneuve is particularly strong.

Ms. de Font-Réaulx stressed that this does not mean that Courbet copied photographs. It shows, instead, the complicated cross-influences between painting and photography, at a time when most photographers had been trained as painters, and painters were fascinated by the possibilities of photography.

Besides the close resemblance between “L’Origine du Monde” and Belloc’s pornographic stereographs, art historians have found strong connections between two of Courbet’s paintings and Vallou’s photographs. When Courbet was working on “The Painter’s Studio,” he asked Bruyas to send him “that photograph of a nude woman about which I have spoken to you. She will be behind my chair in the middle of the painting.” Scholars believe that the photograph in question was probably one of Vallou’s, showing a model from the front partially covering herself with a piece of white cloth.

The same model, a woman named Henriette Bonnion, posed both for Courbet’s “The Bathers” and for another series of nudes by Vallou. Vallou didn’t copyright these pictures until May 1853 — when “The Bathers” was on view at the Salon — although they could have been taken earlier. It is not known whether Courbet saw this series of photographs, or whether he ever met Vallou. Still, it’s clear that contemporary photography, including very likely Vallou’s, influenced Courbet’s style.

At the time, critics denounced both Realism and photography for their lack of idealization and their implied slavish imitation of reality. The critic Théophile Gautier attacked “The Bathers” for its break with classical ideals, remarking: “Courbet c’est le Watteau du laid” — “Courbet is the Watteau of ugliness.”

But in fact both Courbet and his contemporaries in photography effected a combination of the real and the ideal. In their nudes, Vallou and his contemporaries captured real, imperfect women — with dirty feet, sagging flesh, or bruises from their corset stays — in classical poses. And Courbet’s paintings reflect this sensibility.

“Photography gave him the mix of the ideal of the nude [but] also the idea of a real woman — not an ideal woman but a particular woman,” Ms. de Font-Reaulx said.

Sometimes Courbet took “reality” further than the photographers. In the catalog, Ms. de Font-Réaulx compares Vallou’s soft, blurred photographs of Bonnion with Courbet’s uncompromising — and, Silvestre argued, exaggerated — depiction of her in “The Bathers.”

Courbet’s ability to absorb and transform influences from photography, as well as classical painting, lithography, and popular illustration, is a testament to his faith in his genius and his unique vision, Ms. de Font-Réaulx said: “He was so confident in himself that he was able to mix all these sources and make something different and new.”