Die Weite

Courbet spent the late summer of 1869 on the Normandy coast at Étretat and did almost nothing there except paint the Channel. He worked fast, much of it with a palette knife, laying the paint on thick enough that the water has real weight. Two canvases from that run went to the Paris Salon the following spring, a few months before the war with Prussia and the Commune that would put him in prison and then into exile in Switzerland. This one holds none of that. It is the sea at low tide under a heavy sky, with no boat, no figure, no incident of any kind. It reached London in 1901 among the 82 paintings left to the museum by the collector Constantine Ionides.