La Meuse à Freyr

In 1855 Courbet put up a wooden shed of his own beside the Exposition Universelle in Paris, hung 40 of his pictures in it and charged a franc at the door, because the official jury had refused the largest of them. Belgium was friendlier ground, and he went there in 1856. Somewhere on the Meuse above Dinant he painted this wall of rock standing over the water. Lille, which owns it, now identifies the site as the Moniat cliff facing the village of Anseremme, and keeps the older name, Freyr, as a former title. Much of the stone is laid on with a palette knife rather than a brush. The museum's own note sets these cliffs beside the limestone of the Doubs valley, the country Courbet came from and painted all his life.