Пейзаж с рыбаком

Courbet walked out of prison in March 1872. He had been sentenced for his part in the Paris Commune, and above all for the toppling of the Vendome Column, the bronze monument to Napoleon's victories that the Communards pulled down in May 1871. He went back to Ornans in the Jura and painted landscapes, which were the one thing that still sold for him. The Salon jury refused his submissions that year on political grounds. In 1873 the National Assembly voted that he should personally pay to re-erect the column, a sum no painter could raise, and he crossed into Switzerland that July and never came back. Quiet stretches of water like this one were made in the middle of that, fast, sometimes with studio assistants helping. The canvas went to the Corcoran Gallery in Washington in 1937 and to the National Gallery of Art in 2014.