Snow Effect in a Quarry

Courbet filled many of his winter pictures with the hunt, a stag at bay, a fox, dogs on a trail. This one has a quarry instead. He first tried snow in the hard winter of 1856 into 1857, and through the 1860s the subject grew into a long series that came to some 80 canvases, painted in his home country of the Franche-Comté and later, in exile, in Switzerland. Here pale walls of cut rock rise on the left, a great squared block sits in the snow at the centre, and the scrub along the ledges is white with frost. The only person is small and dark, bent under a bundle of sticks and leaning on a staff on the path below the stone. The snow is laid on thickly, and the signature runs along the lower left in red-brown. The Artizon Museum in Tokyo dates the picture to around 1870.