The Great Oak

By 1843 Gustave Courbet was 24 and only a few years into his life in Paris, a provincial newcomer still teaching himself to paint and a good while from the Realism that would later make him notorious. This is one of those early works, a small landscape in oil on paper built around a single spreading oak. Trees like it stood all through the Franche-Comte country of eastern France where he had grown up, and he kept coming back to them. Two decades on he would paint a far more famous one, the great oak at Flagey. Here the handling is looser and quieter, the study of a young man working outdoors. The sheet is only about 30 centimetres across, later mounted on canvas, and it now hangs at the Colby College Museum of Art in Maine.