A floresta de Fontainebleau

A label on the back of this small panel says the forest of Fontainebleau, and for a long time that settled the question. Fontainebleau, south-east of Paris, was where the Barbizon painters had set up, and by the middle of the century a wooded clearing painted on the spot read as their ground. Courbet belonged somewhere else. A curator at the Cahors museum, Catherine Coustols, has suggested the place is really the Puits Noir, a dark ravine near Courbet's home town of Ornans where the Breme runs between mossy rocks, a site he came back to again and again. The panel reached Cahors in 1902 in the bequest of a local collector, Frederic Suisse, and in 1996 restorers lifted the paint layer off the wood and laid it down on canvas.