Il ruscello nero

This dark, shaded gorge is a real place: the Puits-Noir, a spot on the Brème stream in a narrow valley near Ornans, the Franche-Comté town where Courbet grew up. He painted it many times over the 1860s and knew every rock and root of it. Look closely and much of the surface is not brushed but spread with a palette knife, the paint dragged across in flat strokes that build the wet stone and the dense leaves. There is a quiet irony in what came next. Courbet was a defiant republican who would later be jailed and ruined for his part in the Paris Commune, yet this landscape was bought in 1867 for the personal collection of the emperor he despised, Napoleon III. The stream still runs through the Franche-Comté woods today.