Ewigkeit

Courbet spent the autumn of 1865 at Trouville on the Normandy coast, a fishing town the railway had recently turned into a fashionable resort. He worked there for the visitors, painting society portraits and a run of sea pictures. He went back to the same subject at Etretat in 1869, and Bristol dates this one somewhere between those two seasons. There is no harbour in it, no boat, no incident, only water and sky. Courbet worked on a dark ground rather than a white one, the opposite of what the younger Impressionists would do, and pushed the grey of the sea on with a palette knife. He explained his method plainly. Nature without the sun is dark too, so he lit only the parts that projected. Bristol has had the painting since 1952.