musée Courbet

Gustave Courbet was born in 1819 in this house on the river Loue in Ornans, a small town in the Franche-Comte hills, and he never really left the place behind. The painter who declared he would paint only what he could see, and made ordinary Franche-Comte country people the size of history heroes, kept coming back to these valleys for his subjects. The museum is the family house he grew up in, right on the water's edge.

Inside are his paintings, drawings and personal things, set in the actual rooms and landscape that formed his eye. Some of the cliffs, trout streams and deep green pools he painted are visible from the windows or a short walk away.

Courbet died in exile in Switzerland in 1877. He had joined the Paris Commune and been held responsible for the toppling of the Vendome Column, and the bill for rebuilding it ruined him.