Cascade in a Rocky Landscape

By the early 1870s Gustave Courbet's life had turned political, then legal. He had taken part in the Paris Commune of 1871 and was blamed for the toppling of the Vendôme Column in Paris, and the courts eventually ordered him to pay for rebuilding it. In 1873 he crossed into Switzerland to escape that debt, and he never came home. Through all of it he kept returning to the subject he had painted for decades, the deep limestone gorges and falling water of his native Franche-Comté, in eastern France, near Ornans. This is one of those cascades, worked up largely with a palette knife in thick, wet slabs of paint instead of a smooth finish. That loaded, physical handling was something the younger painters soon called Impressionists watched very closely.