Las rocas de Ornans o las rocas de Mouthier

Courbet grew up in Ornans, a town in the Jura hills of eastern France, and he came back to these limestone cliffs again and again. The great rock face here is the Hautepierre, which hangs over the village of Mouthier a short way upriver from his home. He cared about this spot enough to put it on the easel in his huge 1855 painting The Painter's Studio, his statement of what art should be. By the time he painted this version, in 1869, Courbet was famous, combative and increasingly political. Two years later he threw himself into the Paris Commune, the short-lived revolutionary government of 1871, and was blamed for the toppling of a monument in the city. He was jailed for it and spent his last years in exile across the border in Switzerland.