Pequena marinha

In 1872 Courbet could not exhibit. He had spent the previous autumn and winter in prison and then in a clinic, sentenced over the toppling of the Vendome Column during the Commune, and when he submitted work to the Paris Salon that spring the jury refused it on political grounds. He owed money and was about to owe far more. In 1873 the state sent him the bill for putting the column back up.

So he painted a good many of these. Small seascapes, quickly made, for dealers and private buyers. This one is about 35 by 46 centimetres, a flat horizon, a band of surf, weather coming across. He had been painting the Channel since the 1860s and could turn these out well away from it.

He left France for Switzerland in July 1873, ahead of the bill, and died there in 1877.