The Sarrazine Grotto

The Salon jury of 1864 refused Courbet's Venus and Psyche as indecent, and he spent much of that year back home in Franche-Comte, painting the places where rivers come out of the rock. This is one of them, the Grotte Sarrazine near Nans-sous-Sainte-Anne, an opening in the cliff roughly 100 metres high. It carries water only after heavy rain, when the underground course of the Lison backs up and spills out of the cave mouth, so the torrent Courbet painted here runs on only a handful of days in the year. The small fisherman at the foot of the rock is there to give the scale of the arch. Courbet went back to these river sources again and again through the 1860s, the source of the Loue above all, sometimes several canvases of the same hole in the ground. This one has been in the museum at Lons-le-Saunier since 1900.