Wooded Hillside in Winter

By 1877, the year Courbet died, this small snow scene was already in Boston, in the hands of William Faxon, one of the men who had founded the Museum of Fine Arts seven years earlier. It is signed G. Courbet at the lower left. Faxon kept it until his death in 1899, his widow held on to it for another 25 years, and in 1924 she sold it to the museum for 500 dollars. The label it carries today is more cautious than the signature. The museum catalogues it as a work of Courbet's workshop, painted in his studio and sent out under his name, but at least partly by an assistant's hand. The picture itself is modest, a wooded slope under snow on a canvas a little over half a metre tall.