Summer Landscape

In the first half of the 1850s, when this little canvas was painted, Courbet was the most argued-about painter in Paris. His A Burial at Ornans, shown at the Salon of 1850 to 1851, stretched more than six metres wide and gave the people of his native Ornans the scale usually kept for history painting. This summer landscape is less than 40 centimetres across. A mill wheel sits in the middle, a figure walks with a few cows up the slope, and the hills behind open onto pale outcrops of rock. The Bavarian state collections bought it from a private owner in 1906. Munich had its own reason to want Courbet. In 1869 he had shown six paintings at the city's Glass Palace exhibition, was decorated by King Ludwig II of Bavaria, and left a deep mark on young local painters such as Wilhelm Leibl.