Gustave Courbet

Galerie Brame, Paris
Durand-Ruel, Paris (by 1910)
Galerie Rosenberg, Paris (by 1912)
Galerie Moos, Geneva
Sale: Sotheby's, New York, May 7, 1998, lot 150, illustrated
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner

Robert Fernier, La vie et l'oeuvre de Gustave Courbet, Lausanne and Paris, 1978, vol. II, no. 1038, p. 230, illustrated p. 231

The following condition report was kindly provided by Simon Parkes Art Conservation, Inc.: This work has been restored. The canvas has an old glue lining. The texture of the paint is unaffected by the lining; many areas are naturally smooth because of the artist’s use of the palette knife. The only restoration seems to be in the red shrubs in the center of the right side, where an area measuring about 2 by 1 inches has received retouching. It is slightly difficult to identify the actual nature of the damage, but the restoration seems well applied.
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

Courbet lived his last years as an exile in Switzerland, crossing the border from France in July 1873 and, by that autumn, settling into the village of La Tour-de-Peliz on the north shore of Lac Léman (Lake Geneva).  After the Commune uprisings of 1870-1, the artist was temporarily imprisoned over his alleged involvement in the toppling of the Vendôme Column, and soon after his release was deemed financially responsible for its reconstruction.  His property seized, Courbet had little choice but to flee the country to avoid garnishments, if not more jail time.  Robert Fernier dates the present work circa 1876— suggesting that this landscape, reminiscent of those painted around Ornans a decade earlier, was recreated from memory.  In Courbet’s souvenir pictures, distance of time and place is erased by the artist’s bold brushwork and palette, which creates rustling autumnal trees and a cool, still lake, while a complex arrangement of shape and perspective allows the eye to wander over cliff faces and up snow-capped peaks. Ornans had been Courbet’s home, his refuge and the subject of his most well-known landscape paintings; remembering the hills, forests, cliffs, and streams that most likely provided a kind of solace at the end of his life.