Gustave Courbet

In 1873, Gustave Courbet arrived in Switzerland after incurring large debts following his implication in the destruction of the Vendôme column, which he was personally responsible for replacing. He was drawn to the Château de Chillon, located on the shore of Lake Geneva, just a few miles from La Tour-de-Peilz, where Courbet lived in exile until his death. The château was a frequent tourist destination with a fascinating past; no doubt the political and cultural history of the location and its association with political martyrdom would have had a personal resonance with the artist.

The long history of the château began when a Roman fortress was expanded in the eleventh century. It housed many political prisoners, of whom the most celebrated was François Bonivard, who for his support of the Republic of Geneva was chained to a column in the dungeon between 1532 and 1536. This deeply Romantic and turbulent history created the perfect setting for Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s La nouvelle Héloïse, published in 1761, and inspired Joseph Mallord William Turner during his 1802 visit, with the massive architectural complex depicted in a number of his drawings and watercolors. The publication of Lord Byron’s The Prisoner of Chillon in 1819 brought a whole new level of fame to the castle and inspired Eugène Delacroix’s 1834-5 painting The Prisoner of Chillon (Musée du Louvre, Paris). 

Throughout his time in Switzerland Courbet found inspiration in the château, revisiting the site in his paintings. This particular view focuses on the rough-hewn exterior of the château, emphasizing its connection to the rocky beach in the foreground and the distant snowy peaks of the Alps. It is as if the building has and always will be there: 'the painting gives rise to the sense of place eternally fixed, which is doubtless related to the sensation of enclosure and constraint the artist experienced, profoundly, in exile' (Dominique de Font-Réaulx, Gustave Courbet, exh. cat., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2008, p. 422).