Il castello di Ornans

1855 was the year Courbet fell out with the art establishment for good. When the jury of the Paris world's fair balked at his biggest canvases, he put up his own shed next door, called it the Pavilion of Realism, and charged the public to come in. This quiet landscape is the ground he came from: Ornans, his home town in the valley of the Loue, with houses perched on a spur where a castle once stood before the crown had it pulled down in the 1600s. Down in front is the village washing place. Courbet nicknamed it the fountain of vipers, after the gossip traded by the women who did their laundry there.