The Gust of Wind

Around 1865 Gustave Courbet took on the largest landscape he ever painted, a big canvas meant to decorate a room in the grand Paris house of a duke. The setting looks like the Forest of Fontainebleau, the wooded country south of the city where painters had been going for years to work from nature. But Courbet did something odd with it. Along the horizon, past the windswept oaks, he added a range of mountains, and there are no mountains anywhere near Fontainebleau. He knew that, and he pushed a real place toward invention. You can read the two hands he used in the paint itself: the distant hills are laid in with a fine brush, small and careful, while the rocks and pool in front are dragged on thick with a palette knife. Overhead the storm the title names is already darkening the sky.