The Valley of Les Puits-Noir

By 1868 Courbet was the most talked-about painter in France, a realist forever at odds with the official Salon. Between the quarrels he kept returning to one quiet place: the Puits-Noir, a narrow wooded gorge near Ornans, the town in the Franche-Comté where he grew up. He painted its stream and shaded cliffs many times, and this is one of them — no figure, no incident, just water moving through deep shade. Much of it he built up with a palette knife rather than a brush, so the wet rock and the dense green foliage sit on the canvas in thick, physical slabs. He knew this ravine well enough to paint it from memory back in his Paris studio.