The Stream (Le Ruisseau du Puits-Noir; vallée de la Loue)

In 1855 Paris held its first world's fair, and Courbet ended up on both sides of it. The jury of the Exposition Universelle accepted 11 of his paintings but turned down A Burial at Ornans and The Painter's Studio, his two huge figure canvases. So he put up a pavilion of his own nearby, called it the Pavilion of Realism, and showed them there himself. This landscape went the other way. It hung inside the official exhibition, catalogued as the stream of the Puits-Noir in the valley of the Loue, a wooded gorge near his home town of Ornans, and it is thought to be the earliest of his many views of that spot. He signed and dated it in the lower left corner, G. Courbet 55. In 1897 it was bought by the New York collectors Henry and Louisine Havemeyer, whose daughter gave it to the National Gallery in Washington in 1943.