The Black Rocks at Trouville

The first owner the National Gallery of Art can name for this small sea picture is Mary Cassatt, the American painter who made her career in Paris, though the museum allows that it may have belonged to her family rather than to her. After 1943 it passed through dealers and collectors in London, Buenos Aires, Boston and New York before the gallery bought it in 2011. Courbet painted it on the Normandy coast in 1865 or 1866, one of a run of canvases he called paysages de mer, sea landscapes, made of almost nothing but sand, water and sky. Here the sunset was worked with brushes and the palette knife over a dark ground that still shows through. A thin line of turquoise sits on the horizon, and the wet sand in front of the rocks was smeared flat with sideways strokes of the knife.