Der einsame Felsen

By 1862 Courbet was the most argued-over painter in France. The large scenes of village funerals and stone breakers had made his name and most of his enemies, and they did not sell. Landscapes did. He turned them out steadily through the 1860s, often laying the paint on with a palette knife instead of a brush, which let him cover a canvas fast and made the work almost impossible to mistake for anyone else's.

That pace had a consequence. Courbet's landscapes were copied in his own studio while he lived and forged in quantity after his death in 1877, and separating the hands has kept specialists busy ever since.

This one reached Brooklyn in 1941 as a gift from the Havemeyers, the New York collecting family whose buying in Paris was steered for years by the American painter Mary Cassatt.