Die Quelle des Léri bei Chassagne

By 1863 Courbet had spent a decade scandalising Paris with big pictures of ordinary country people, and he was turning more and more to the landscape of the region where he grew up, the wooded limestone country around Ornans in eastern France. This spring rises in the village of Chassagne, close to home, and for a long time nobody realised that. The picture was thought to show a stretch of the Atlantic coast until the museum devoted to Courbet helped place it. Anyone who visits now can still find the pools and the rock wall he painted, barely changed. Courbet simplified the scene into a few clear masses of stone and summer green, and worked the light and shadow with the thick, loaded brush that made his landscapes feel as physical as the ground they show.