The Mediterranean

Courbet first saw the Mediterranean in 1854, on a long stay near Montpellier, and that visit went mostly on portraits and commissions, with only a handful of seascapes to show for it. The Phillips Collection dates this canvas to 1857 and thinks it was probably painted on a second trip to the same coast three years later. It came to Washington in 1924, bought by Duncan Phillips, the collector who founded the museum. Phillips at first filed Courbet away as an unrelenting realist, a painter who fought sentimentality on instinct. Over the years he changed his mind about him, and ended up calling Courbet a romantic poet of the type of Walt Whitman, a painter of the elemental forces of nature and the immensity of the sea and sky.