Les Coquelicots

Gustave Courbet made his name with enormous canvases that unsettled the Paris Salon, funerals and stone-breakers painted life-size, so it is a surprise to find him working this small, on a piece of cardboard barely the size of a sheet of paper. He liked to start these little studies from an almost black ground and then push the paint toward the light, so the red of the poppies seems to surface out of the dark rather than sit on top of it. There is no story being told here, just flowers looked at closely by a painter who insisted that beauty was already there in ordinary nature and did not need improving. The panel came to the museum in Cahors in 1902 as part of a bequest, and spends most of its time in storage rather than on the wall.