Mountainous landscape with fruit trees in Ornans

1873 was the year Courbet lost his valley. On 30 May the National Assembly voted to rebuild the Vendôme Column, pulled down during the Commune two years earlier, and to charge him for it. He crossed into Switzerland on 23 July, settled that October at La Tour-de-Peilz on Lake Geneva, and never saw Ornans again. This canvas carries the date 1873, on one side or the other of that crossing, and it shows the country he came from: fruit trees on a slope under the grey limestone above the Loue. In exile he kept painting that valley alongside his lake views, partly to pay down a bill finally fixed at 323,091 francs. He died at La Tour-de-Peilz on 31 December 1877, the day before the first annual instalment fell due.