Valley

1857 was a loud year for Courbet in Paris. He sent six paintings to the Salon, among them Young Ladies on the Banks of the Seine, two women sprawled asleep in rumpled clothes on the riverbank, which was read as an affront to decency and argued over in the press for months.

He painted this valley in the same season. The limestone country of Franche-Comte, around his home town of Ornans in eastern France, is the landscape he came back to all his life, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art holds this one under no title more specific than Valley.

It is a modest canvas, 65 by 81 centimetres, beside the near life-size figure paintings he was fighting about that year.