[1] The painting depicts a nude woman standing upright between an opening in the rocks and holding in her hands a pitcher, from which water flows.

[7] She stands between two flowers, with their "vulnerability to males who wish to pluck them",[7] and is framed by ivy, plant of Dionysus the god of disorder, regeneration, and ecstasy.

[1][10] Haldane Macfall in A History of Painting: The French Genius describes The Source as Ingres' "superb nude by which he is chiefly known".

[11] In his Confessions of a Young Man, Irish novelist George Moore wrote, with relation to the morality of artistic production, "What care I that the virtue of some sixteen-year-old maid was the price for Ingres' La Source?

That the model died of drink and disease in the hospital is nothing when compared with the essential that I should have La Source, that exquisite dream of innocence.