The Wave

Courbet spent the autumn of 1869 at Etretat on the Normandy coast, painting the sea again and again. In those years he turned out something like 60 versions of a breaking wave, and dealers took them as fast as he could make them.

Two of the seascapes went to the Paris Salon in 1870, and critics who had spent 20 years calling him a vulgar provincial finally applauded. He wrote home that nobody had ever had a success like the one he was having with his sea pictures. Within weeks the government offered him the Legion of Honour and he turned it down in an open letter, saying he recognised no regime except freedom.

The wave in this one rolls straight at the viewer. It was bought from an Amsterdam collection in 1908 by the association of Frankfurt citizens that supports the Stadel, and it has hung there since.