Une gorge dans le Jura

In May 1873 the French National Assembly voted that the Vendôme Column, pulled down during the Commune two years before, should be rebuilt at Courbet's expense. He was 54. On 23 July he crossed into Switzerland, and he never came back. The gorge here is his own country, the limestone of the Jura around Ornans where he was born, cut by rivers into the kind of cliff-walled valley he had been painting since the 1850s. Cincinnati dates the canvas to about 1873, which leaves it on one side or the other of that crossing. The bill was finally set in 1877 at 323,091 francs, payable in yearly instalments over 33 years. He died in Switzerland that December, before the first one fell due, and the painting reached Cincinnati in 1910 in John J. Emery's bequest.