Calm Sea

In the autumn of 1865, Courbet spent a season at Trouville, a fashionable bathing resort on the Normandy coast, painting beside the younger American James Whistler. The sea got into him. Over the next few years he made a long run of marines, seascapes pared down to almost nothing, and this calm one from 1866 is among them. A thin band of beach, a flat sheet of water, and above it a great bank of soft cloud that fills most of the canvas. No ship, no wreck, no story. Courbet, who had built his name on hard-edged realism, is here just painting weather and light on an ordinary afternoon. He often loaded the paint on thickly with a palette knife, and worked this sky in loose, blurred strokes. He signed it in red at the lower left.