Küstenszene

In 1854 Courbet spent the summer at Montpellier as the guest of Alfred Bruyas, a banker's son who had started buying his paintings when hardly anyone else would, and it was on that stay that he first painted open sea. The coast pictures dated to that year are small and quickly made, a band of water, a band of sky and very little in between, which was not what a finished painting was supposed to look like in 1854. He was 35 and notorious, four years after a vast canvas of a village funeral had been attacked in Paris for putting peasants on the scale reserved for history. He kept at seascapes for the rest of his life, dozens of them on the Normandy coast in the 1860s, and those sold more easily than the pictures that had made his name.