Paesaggio: vicino a Ornans

Courbet made this in 1872, the year he came home. Months earlier he had been in a Paris prison, jailed for his part in the Paris Commune and blamed for the toppling of the Vendome Column, the great victory monument in the city. Released in March, still facing ruinous fines for that column, he returned to Ornans, the small town in eastern France where he had grown up, and painted the landscape he knew best: the wooded valley of the river Loue, its grey cliffs and still water. There is no politics in it at all, just the ground of home laid on thickly, often with a palette knife. Within two years the fines drove him across the border into exile in Switzerland, where he died.