Landscape near Maizières

By 1865 Courbet was famous mostly for people: the life-size villagers and mourners that had scandalised the Paris Salon and made his name the byword for Realism. This is the other Courbet, the one who went home each summer to the Franche-Comté in eastern France and painted the country he grew up in. Near the village of Maizières the limestone of the Jura pushes up through green meadow in pale flat-topped rocks, and here it takes the whole picture. The houses sit small in the shadow of the plateau. Courbet often laid the paint on thick with a palette knife, working the rock and grass as much by texture as by drawing. The painting reached Munich's Neue Pinakothek in 1912, given as part of the collection assembled by the museum's director, Hugo von Tschudi.