Stream of the Puits-Noir at Ornans

The Puits-Noir, the Black Well, is a wooded gorge on the little river Breme, a couple of miles upstream from Ornans in eastern France. Courbet painted it over and over across his life, and worked on this canvas during a visit home in the autumn of 1868. There is no story in it, no figure, no incident. He called this kind of picture a landscape of profound solitude. Look closely and you can almost feel the tools: he laid the frothy water and the pale, lichen-crusted limestone cliffs with a palette knife, dragging and scraping the paint, then used a brush for the thin bare branches reaching across the shade. It is a damp, enclosed gorge that barely sees direct sun, which is why the greens here stay so deep and cool.