L'onda

In the autumn of 1869 an equinox storm battered the Normandy coast, and Courbet, who had rented a house that summer at Etretat, went out to watch the sea heave. He painted the water while the weather was still up, and left everything else out. There is no beach, no boat, no figure on the shore, just one green wall of water rising against a low, bruised sky. He made a whole run of these that season, and this is one of them. When two of his waves reached the Paris Salon they were a hit, which for Courbet, long treated as a troublemaker by the official art world, did not happen often.