By Sarah Hall, executive director Washington County Museum of Fine Art

Gustave Courbet (French, 1819-1877)
Landscape
Circa 1873-1875
Oil on canvas
Washington County Museum of Fine Arts
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. William H. Singer, Jr., Olden Norway, 1931, A03

Gustave Courbet is one of my favorite artists. He is described in the foreword to a publication on his landscape paintings as one of the most “notorious avant-garde figures in the history of art.” So, I wonder, can we see that at all in this work?

First, look at the whole image above. Then, take a look at some of the details I’ve included. I’m hoping that even in this digital format you can get a sense of Courbet’s technique. It’s full of texture, there are myriad flecks of color in the water and the rocks, and it’s a WILD landscape—we see no hint of the touch or presence of man. It’s nearly primeval. Unlike many landscapes, we aren’t given a horizon line and our view isn’t framed to highlight the pastoral, instead, we’re facing a cliff.

Detail of cliff face showing Courbet’s typical technique of applying think paint, and in some instances scraping it away to create textures,

Another detail showing the visceral quality of the brushstrokes and his use of color in the water and rocks.

The material qualities of oil paint are splendidly displayed here, and in some areas in the central rocks, there is evidence of Courbet’s characteristic technique of using a palette knife or the handle of a brush to scrape into his paint layers emphasizing the ruggedness of the geology.

As a notorious, avant-garde figure, Courbet was known for paintings that shocked viewers—paintings like A Burial at Ornans (in the collection of the Musée d’Orsay) that elevated common village life to heroic proportions. He is a key figure in the Realist movement of the mid-1800s—a movement that was based on the idea of painting the truth of the world as the artist saw it. Painting truth and painting realistically aren’t necessarily the same thing—an artist like Courbet would use all of the tools of painting to emphasize the truth he wanted to present. Courbet’s Realism was social, political, and nationalistic. Courbet’s politics landed him in prison for a time.

More than 10’ high and 20’ across, Courbet’s A Burial at Ornans was an extremely controversial painting when first exhibited. Gustave Courbet, A Burial at Ornans, 1849-50, collection Musée d’Orsay.

The museum’s landscape is one of the late landscapes Courbet painted to stay afloat in his last years after prison, while exiled in Switzerland. Many of those landscapes were essentially memories of his native Franch-Comté region. It’s poignant to imagine Courbet painting this memory of the landscape of his youth while living in exile. Simply by choosing this wild, uninhabited place, and putting all his skills in the service of the rugged terrain, Courbet paints a sort of personal manifesto to both the act of painting and his attachment to native region.