La desembocadura del Sena

In 1841 Gustave Courbet was 22 and had never seen the sea. He took a boat down the Seine from Paris to the Normandy coast, and somewhere near the river's mouth at Honfleur he looked at open water for the first time. This small canvas is what came out of that trip. A screen of trees, two figures on the shore, a few sailing boats out on the grey water under a heavy sky. There is none of the swagger of his later work yet. Twenty years on, the picture came to Lille as a gift from Auguste Richebe, the town's mayor and a collector, who had bought it straight from Courbet.