Die Grotte von Sarrazine bei Nans-sous-Sainte-Anne

Courbet grew up in Ornans, in the limestone country of the Jura mountains in eastern France, and in the mid-1860s he kept coming back to paint its caves. This one shows the grotto of Sarrazine, a dark mouth in the rock with a clear stream running out of it, a spot walkers already visited near his home town. He worked the paint almost like the rock itself, laying it on thick with a palette knife and scraping it back to catch the craggy, wet surface of the stone. There is no story here and barely any sky, just the pull of the tunnel and the water coming toward you. Courbet held that a painter should only paint what he had actually seen and lived among, and this damp hollow in his own hills was exactly that kind of subject.