Le Puits-Noir

The Puits-Noir, the Black Well, was a spot Courbet had known since boyhood, a place near his home town of Ornans where a small stream, the Breme, runs between high rocks under a thick roof of leaves, so little light reaches the water that it looks almost black. He came back to it for decades. In the mid-1860s especially he painted it many times, and he wrote to a friend of wanting a landscape of deep solitude, made in the depths of his own country's valleys. He built the picture up over a dark ground, letting the greens and the wet rock emerge from shadow rather than sit on white. The real ravine is still there, walkable today along paths that carry his name.