Vale do Loue

Courbet grew up in Ornans, a town folded into the valley of the river Loue in eastern France, and he came back to paint that limestone country again and again across his whole career. This is one of those returns, from 1865. By then he was the most talked-about painter in France, notorious for putting ordinary country people on canvases the size usually kept for kings and saints. Here there is no one to argue about, only the cliffs, the water, and the trees of the place he knew before he knew anything of the Paris art world. He built the rock and the foliage up with a palette knife as much as a brush, so the surface feels almost as solid as the hillside it shows.