Vue panoramique des Alpes, les Dents du Midi

Courbet painted this wide view across Lake Geneva in the last year of his life. After the fall of the Paris Commune in 1871 he had been blamed for the toppling of the Vendôme Column, fined an impossible sum toward rebuilding it, and driven into exile in Switzerland to avoid prison. There, looking south at the row of peaks called Les Dents du Midi, he worked this large canvas mostly with a palette knife, dragging the rock and snow into place in broad slabs. He meant it for the Paris World's Fair of 1879 and never finished it. The lower right corner is still bare canvas. Courbet died in Switzerland in December 1877, aged 58, without going home.