The Cliffs of Essart-Cendrin

This is early Courbet, 1847, before almost anyone knew the name. He was in his late 20s, painting the country he came from, the Franche-Comté, the limestone valleys and cliffs around Ornans in eastern France, near the Swiss border. Essart-Cendrin was one of those places. The huge Realist pictures that would make him famous and infamous, the Burial at Ornans among them, were still two or three years off, and the 1848 revolution that fed his politics had not happened yet. Here he is just a young man from the provinces painting his home ground, close and unshowy. One small landscape of these cliffs he sold to a local ironmaster for 200 francs.