The Lake, Near Saint-Point

Courbet walked out of custody on 2 March 1872, after a six-month sentence for his part in the toppling of the Napoleonic column on the place Vendome during the Commune. That spring the Salon jury refused everything he sent in. He went back to Franche-Comte and painted what was near at hand, and the Lac de Saint-Point is a long narrow lake in the Jura, up the valley from Ornans where he was born. Landscapes were the part of his output that still found buyers while his name was poison in Paris, and he turned them out steadily in these months, at times with assistants working on the canvases beside him. In 1873 the National Assembly voted to bill him for re-erecting the column. He crossed into Switzerland that summer and never saw this valley again.