Stream in the Forest

Courbet probably painted this in the summer of 1862, and for one of his forest streams it is unusually big, more than one and a half metres tall. The museum draws attention to where he put the viewer. We seem to hang in the air somewhere between the feathery tops of the trees and their reflection in the water, looking down at young deer on the bank. In the 1860s woodland scenes like this were what Courbet could sell, to city buyers who wanted the countryside on their walls. In the spring of 1865 he wrote to the Paris dealer Jules Luquet offering a batch of pictures, among them a Stag at the Water for 300 francs, and scholars have tentatively matched that entry with this canvas. In the 1930s it belonged to Alfred Chester Beatty, the American-born mining magnate who collected in London, and it came to Boston in 1955.