Rocks near the Loue cave (Felsen nahe der Grotte der Loue)

In 1942 the Nazi party's chancellery in Munich bought this Courbet from a gallery in the same city. Only months earlier a Hamburg owner, recorded just by the initial W., had sent it to an auction in Berlin, where it failed to sell. After the war American officers secured it at the Central Collecting Point, the Munich depot where the Allies gathered art found in German hands. In 1956 ownership passed to the state of Bavaria, whose collections still hold it. Before 1942 the trail is thin. The painting was auctioned in Amsterdam in 1911 from a collector's estate, and then nothing is known of it for three decades. In 2025 the museum reported it to Lost Art, the German database for works whose loss under Nazi persecution cannot be ruled out. The canvas, from around 1872, shows a gorge on the Loue, the river of Courbet's home country, with a ruined tower on the cliff at upper right.