The Oak at Flagey

Courbet painted this single oak in 1864, standing near his family's farm at Flagey, in the Franche-Comté hills where he grew up. He gave it a grand second name: the Oak of Vercingétorix, after the Gaulish chieftain who had once resisted Julius Caesar's legions, as if this one tree could stand for an ancient, native France rooted in his own countryside. There is no story here beyond the tree itself, filling the canvas from roots to crown, painted thick and solid. The picture went on its own long journey after his death, passing through America and then to a collector in Japan, before the museum in his home town of Ornans brought it back to France in 2012.