Водопады

In the summer of 1864 Courbet went home. He was back in the Franche-Comte, the wooded valley country around Ornans where he had grown up, and he spent that season painting its streams and rock faces over and over, often several versions of the same shaded spot. These were places he knew the sombre quiet of, where the water pools so dark it looks bottomless. He built the scene less with a brush than with a palette knife, troweling on rock and foliage in slabs of paint you can still see standing off the canvas. There are no people and no story, just water and stone. For a painter who had made his name on huge canvases of country funerals and stone-breakers, these forest corners were where he went to work with his hands and answer to no one.