The Glen at Ornans (Bords du Doubs; Effet d’Automne)

By 1866 Gustave Courbet was notorious in Paris for huge, blunt scenes of provincial life, yet the pictures that sold most steadily were landscapes of the valley around Ornans, his home town in the Jura hills of eastern France. This one is an autumn view, a tall tree in copper leaf above a grassy bank, a grey outcrop of rock, and a dark strip of river in the lower right. The French title calls the place the banks of the Doubs. Ornans actually lies on the Loue, a tributary of the Doubs, in the département named after the larger river. Courbet signed it and wrote '66 in the lower left corner. Its later life ran through America. After a Paris sale in 1898 it passed to the dealer Durand-Ruel, then to a Boston collector, and eventually to Duncan Phillips, founder of the Phillips gallery in Washington, who gave it to Yale, his old university, in 1939.