Sur les bords du lac Léman

By 1875 Courbet was living on the wrong side of a border he could not cross. Two years earlier he had slipped out of France into Switzerland to escape a ruinous bill for the toppled Vendôme column in Paris, and he settled at La Tour-de-Peilz, a small town on the northern shore of Lake Geneva, the Lac Léman. The water in front of his door became his main subject in these last years. He painted it again and again, often at dusk, when the far mountains soften and the surface goes still. This is one of those views, made in 1875, the light low and the shore quiet. There is none of the crowd or the argument of his famous Paris pictures here, only the lake he could see from the old inn he had bought. He died on that same shore on the last day of 1877, hours before the first payment on the column fell due.