The Castle of Blonay

Courbet painted this in exile. In 1871 he had taken part in the Paris Commune and was blamed for pulling down the Vendome Column, the great Napoleonic monument in the city; when the state billed him for rebuilding it, he crossed into Switzerland in 1873 and never came home. From a house on Lake Geneva he turned out landscapes like this one to pay his debts, many of them finished by his assistant Cherubino Pata, whose hand is thought to be in this snowbound view of the medieval castle at Blonay. But the picture is remembered for something odd that happened to it later. In a Budapest collection it was fixed over the front of Courbet's most notorious canvas, the explicit nude called The Origin of the World, serving for years as a plain snowy lid to keep that painting hidden from view.