La scogliera di Étretat dopo la tempesta

Courbet spent the summer of 1869 in the Normandy town of Etretat, lodging in a house against the cliffs and painting the great chalk headland with its natural arch again and again. This is one of those canvases, the sea gone flat after bad weather, a few beached boats, the light washed clean. He stripped it of anecdote and figures, leaving just rock, water and sky handled with a broad, physical touch, much of it laid on with a palette knife. He sent it to the Paris Salon of 1870, alongside a picture of a breaking wave, and for once the critics praised him almost without reserve. It was nearly the last calm stretch of his life, months before the war with Prussia and the Commune that would land him in prison.