Seascape on the Wide Beach

In 1857 Courbet went back to Montpellier to stay with Alfred Bruyas, a wealthy local collector and his most loyal patron, and from there he went out to Palavas, a fishing village on the flat Mediterranean shore just south of the city. The French title calls this simply a calm sea at Palavas. The painting's later life has been busier than its subject. In September 1941, in occupied Paris, it was bought from the dealer Raphaël Gérard through Hildebrand Gurlitt, an art dealer from Dresden, for the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne. After the war it was traced in Germany, sent back to France in 1951, and listed among the MNR works, paintings recovered from Germany whose rightful owners have never been identified and can still come forward. Since 1952 it has been on deposit at the Musée Paul Valéry in Sète, a port on the same stretch of coast as Palavas.