Le Rocher de Hautepierre

Courbet painted these limestone cliffs near his home town of Ornans, in eastern France, around 1869, plain country he had known since boyhood. The painting's later history is heavier. In March 1935 it was sold at auction in Berlin by Max Silberberg, a Jewish industrialist from Breslau whose great collection was broken up under the pressure of Nazi Germany. He and his wife were later killed in the camps. The Art Institute of Chicago bought the picture in 1967 and has since researched and published that provenance openly. What Courbet left is quieter than the story around it, grey limestone, a screen of trees, and a strip of still green water at the foot of the rock.