The Garden of the Abbey of Loos-lez-Lille

In 1849 the French state bought Courbet's After Dinner at Ornans for 1,500 francs and sent it the next year to the museum in Lille. It was the first of his paintings to enter a public collection. The Lille museum thinks this small landscape was made when he travelled north to see where it had ended up. The abbey named in the title was not a monastery by then. Cistercians had been at Loos since the 12th century, but an order of 1817 turned the buildings into a maison centrale, a prison for long sentences, and prisoners were held there until 2011. Courbet painted the garden under grey cloud, the light he said he preferred, and the abbey church stands among the trees at the back.