View of Frankfurt am Main

Courbet came to Frankfurt in 1858 already notorious at home, the man whose plain, unheroic paintings of ordinary life had scandalised Paris. He took a studio in Sachsenhausen, across the river, and spent the winter hunting stags in the Black Forest and painting the city he could see from his window. This is that view: the Main river, the old bridge, and the cathedral on the far bank, with a single fisherman going about his work in the foreground. It is not an exact record of the skyline. Courbet softened it into something quieter and dreamier than the busy trading town Frankfurt actually was in those years.