View of Lac Léman

In 1873 the French state moved to make Courbet pay for re-erecting the Vendôme Column in Paris. It had been pulled down two years earlier during the Commune, while he chaired the Commune's commission on the arts, and the bill, fixed in 1877, came to more than 300,000 francs, spread over 33 annual instalments. On 23 July 1873 he crossed into Switzerland and never came back. He settled at La Tour-de-Peilz on Lake Geneva and painted the lake again and again, often at sunset. In this one from 1874 a woman bends in the shallows gathering freshwater shellfish into an enormous basket, her red coat the same red as the signature in the corner. He died at La Tour-de-Peilz on the last day of December 1877, the day before the first instalment fell due.