La orilla del mar en Palavas

In 1854 Courbet spent time in Montpellier as the guest of Alfred Bruyas, a wealthy collector who bankrolled his independence. Down the coast at Palavas he painted this small, almost empty seascape, a flat band of Mediterranean under a wide sky, split near the middle by the horizon. The one thing breaking all that horizontal calm is a small figure on the shore raising his hat to the sea. That figure is Courbet himself, greeting the element as an equal. He had grown up far inland and only really came to grips with the sea that year.