Rocks at Mouthier

This is the country Courbet came from. He grew up in Ornans, in the Franche-Comte near the Swiss border, and these pale cliffs are the rocks of Hautepierre, a wall of limestone hanging over the village of Mouthier in the valley of the Loue. He painted this spot again and again through the 1850s. Look at how the stone is built up. Courbet worked much of it with a palette knife instead of a brush, dragging and scraping the paint into slabs until the surface almost seems quarried out of the cliff it shows. He was after the sheer weight of real rock, and the scraped paint gives it. The same limestone country appears on the easel inside his huge Painter's Studio of 1855. The canvas later crossed the Atlantic when Duncan Phillips, who opened one of the first museums of modern art in America, bought it early in his collecting for his gallery in Washington.