The Bridge at Nahin

Before the scandals, before Paris, there was a boy in the Franche-Comte with a paintbox. Gustave Courbet grew up in Ornans, a small town set in a limestone valley in eastern France, and this bridge comes from his very first efforts, made while he was still a student there in the late 1830s. His drawing teacher, a local man named Beau, had the unusual habit of marching his pupils out of the classroom to work in the open air, in front of the actual fields and water. So here is the Loue valley Courbet knew by heart: a low stone bridge, the stream, the wooded slope, set down small and plainly by a teenager who had not yet learned the rules he would later make his name breaking. He never really left this country behind. Across his whole career the Loue and the cliffs around Ornans would come back again and again in his painting.