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By 1863 Courbet was the most argued-over painter in France, the realist whose huge canvases of stonebreakers and country funerals had affronted Paris with their refusal to prettify ordinary life. This is him in a quieter register. A low band of wet sand, a flat sea, and above it far more sky than shore, painted with the palette knife he liked to drag across the surface. The water here barely moves. A few years later, on the Normandy coast, he would turn the same subject into towering breakers throwing spray over the beach.