The Brook of Les Puits-Noir

A few miles from Courbet's home town of Ornans there is a narrow, shaded gorge the locals call the Puits Noir, the black well, where a stream runs under dense overhanging trees and the light barely reaches the water. Courbet went back to paint it again and again. Part of the pull was the place itself, cool and enclosed, but part was money: the pictures sold. In an 1866 letter he boasted about the large sum he had been paid for a dozen paintings of the site. This is one of them, the brook threading between wet rocks and green shade, worked up with a palette knife until the foliage becomes a dense, almost tangible mass.