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Lot Essay
Courbet’s paintings of his native Franche-Comté blanched with a crisp layer of snow were a striking departure from precedent in French painting. The artist’s christening of the winter landscape both inspired his Impressionist successors and irrevocably altered the course of the genre; no landscape painter after Courbet could consider their oeuvre complete without a snow-filled winter landscape. Claude Monet was considered the undisputed master of the Impressionist ‘effet de neige’, but he was not alone in his fascination with the subject: Paul Cézanne, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley, Gustave Caillebotte and others also produced images that depicted the special character of the air, light and delicate chromatic effects associated with landscapes blanketed with snow.
Courbet first painted the subject in the cold winter of 1856-7, but it was only in the 1860s that he engaged more deeply with the theme, exploring snow and its textures in a series of paintings that would ultimately number eighty scenes, observed first in the Franche-Comté and later, during the artist’s self-imposed exile, in the Swiss Alps. While his later works in this theme are stark and desolate, conveying the desperation of the artist’s condition in the final years of his life, his earlier paintings of snow, including La fôret en hiver, are bright and glisten with sunlit shades of pure white and blue. For Courbet, these scenes of nature at its greatest intensity offered matchless scope for his immense ambitions and the snow-swept Franche-Comté landscape quickly became a personal trademark.
The self-declared bad boy of French Realist art, Courbet spent the first decades of his career in noisy subversion. Hunting scenes were ever bolder, bigger and bloodier, nudes shocked with their fleshiness. ‘When I am no longer controversial, I will no longer be important,’ wrote Courbet to his parents in 1852 (P. ten-Doesschat Chu, Letters of Gustave Courbet, Chicago, 1992, p. 106, no. 52-53). By the mid-1860s, with his reputation secure, Courbet now was at greater liberty to focus on his own artistry. Yet, he never ceased to prod and poke at the Bonapartist establishment, both with his subjects and his technique.
For Courbet, one of the great technical innovators of his generation, the application of paint to canvas was a process deeply embroiled with his innate sense of his own artistry. In an open letter to his students, Courbet explained that paint and its own materiality was of central importance to the images he created with it: 'Painting’ he explained ‘is essentially a concrete art and can only consist of the representation of real and existing things. It is a completely physical language, which is made up not by words, but of all physical objects. An abstract object, being invisible and non-existent, does not form part of the domain of painting' (Le Courrier du dimanche, Paris, 25 December 1861). Cézanne observed of Courbet’s occupation with the fabrication of art, he was ‘a builder, a rude troweller of plaster, a crusher of color’ (P. M. Doran, Conversations avec Cezanne, Paris, 1978, p. 142). In the layering of paint on canvas, he explained and paraphrased the process of nature. Courbet welcomed spectators to his studio and those who witnessed the artist at work described his use of unconventional techniques and tools. Courbet began his compositions on a dark layer of color. ‘You’re astonished that my canvas is black!’ he challenged, ‘nature without the sun is black and dark: I do what light does, I light up the prominent points, and the painting is done’ (M. Claudet, Souvenirs: Gustave Courbet, Paris, 1878, p. 9). Courbet laid down his paint with palette knife, spatula, sponges and blotting rags, building up an image out of darkness and creating a richly textured surface.
His paintings of landscapes chilled by winter afforded him the opportunity to employ these techniques in the spirit of mimicking nature most creatively and to greatest effect. Having played the part of the sun, illuminating his subjects from blackness, Courbet’s elemental role also encompassed that of the snowstorm which blustered through his compositions, blanketing Franche-Comté’s limestone ravines and tree-lined watering spots. In La fôret en hiver, Courbet’s varied application of paint perfectly captures the irregularity and complexity of his natural subject. Snow is flaked onto the canvas with a palette knife in its various textures, forming crunchy snow-packed banks and feathery sprays on winter-stripped trees. Cool blue ice is slicked smooth with large soft brushes. Drawing on the palette Courbet had introduced earlier in the decade, the painting is a harmony of tinted whites, steely greys and blues. A gifted colorist, Courbet laced the startling whiteness of the painting with the rusted browns and black of rock and earth which peek darkly from underneath a blanket of snow white.
Landscape painting was the driving force of the second half of Courbet’s career. His passion for the subject was motivated in part by his attachment to his native Franche-Comté. He found great freedom in the unexplored territories of the Jura mountains and delighted in the mystery of the region’s undiscovered places. As Jules-Antoine Castagnary described in his preface to the retrospective exhibition at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1882,‘[T]he landscape according to Courbet does not hand itself over easily. It uses its secrets, its metaphors, and its double meanings carefully, and remains, like the entire oeuvre, fundamentally open to interpretation’ (J. Castagnary, cited in Exposition des oeuvres de Gustave Courbet à l’Ecole des beaux arts, Paris, 1882, pp. 17-18). Partly as a consequence of its unspoiled secrecy, landscape subjects provided Courbet with a powerful platform from which to continue his project of social dissent. The Oak at Flagey, painted in 1864, is a comparable example of a landscape painting saturated with political symbolism. The subject recalls the Tree of Liberty, an icon of the 1848 Revolution and connects the radicalism of this symbol to Courbet’s provincial landscape.
In its tranquility and clarity, La fôret en hiver differs in emotion from the more traditional hunting scenes which emphasize the conflict between the human and the natural. However, close inspection reveals Courbet’s use of a loose, dashed-on brushstroke and spots of color applied with a palette knife which gives an impression of instability. The snow-covered trees appear on the verge of dropping their mantle of white; the water appears to be firm and compact, yet it is not clear if it is completely iced over. This inversion of stability and instability, which is a manifestation of Courbet’s own skeptical philosophy of art and life, steer the eye of the viewer to the figures of the deer. Here, too, Courbet creates a tension: a doe lies peacefully at the edge of the water, while her mate turns to face the forest, on high alert for potential predators.
We are grateful to the Institut Gustave Courbet for confirming the authenticity of this work. It is accompanied by a certificate from the Institut Gustave Courbet dated 24 June 2019, and will be included in their forthcoming Gustave Courbet catalogue raisonné.
Courbet first painted the subject in the cold winter of 1856-7, but it was only in the 1860s that he engaged more deeply with the theme, exploring snow and its textures in a series of paintings that would ultimately number eighty scenes, observed first in the Franche-Comté and later, during the artist’s self-imposed exile, in the Swiss Alps. While his later works in this theme are stark and desolate, conveying the desperation of the artist’s condition in the final years of his life, his earlier paintings of snow, including La fôret en hiver, are bright and glisten with sunlit shades of pure white and blue. For Courbet, these scenes of nature at its greatest intensity offered matchless scope for his immense ambitions and the snow-swept Franche-Comté landscape quickly became a personal trademark.
The self-declared bad boy of French Realist art, Courbet spent the first decades of his career in noisy subversion. Hunting scenes were ever bolder, bigger and bloodier, nudes shocked with their fleshiness. ‘When I am no longer controversial, I will no longer be important,’ wrote Courbet to his parents in 1852 (P. ten-Doesschat Chu, Letters of Gustave Courbet, Chicago, 1992, p. 106, no. 52-53). By the mid-1860s, with his reputation secure, Courbet now was at greater liberty to focus on his own artistry. Yet, he never ceased to prod and poke at the Bonapartist establishment, both with his subjects and his technique.
For Courbet, one of the great technical innovators of his generation, the application of paint to canvas was a process deeply embroiled with his innate sense of his own artistry. In an open letter to his students, Courbet explained that paint and its own materiality was of central importance to the images he created with it: 'Painting’ he explained ‘is essentially a concrete art and can only consist of the representation of real and existing things. It is a completely physical language, which is made up not by words, but of all physical objects. An abstract object, being invisible and non-existent, does not form part of the domain of painting' (Le Courrier du dimanche, Paris, 25 December 1861). Cézanne observed of Courbet’s occupation with the fabrication of art, he was ‘a builder, a rude troweller of plaster, a crusher of color’ (P. M. Doran, Conversations avec Cezanne, Paris, 1978, p. 142). In the layering of paint on canvas, he explained and paraphrased the process of nature. Courbet welcomed spectators to his studio and those who witnessed the artist at work described his use of unconventional techniques and tools. Courbet began his compositions on a dark layer of color. ‘You’re astonished that my canvas is black!’ he challenged, ‘nature without the sun is black and dark: I do what light does, I light up the prominent points, and the painting is done’ (M. Claudet, Souvenirs: Gustave Courbet, Paris, 1878, p. 9). Courbet laid down his paint with palette knife, spatula, sponges and blotting rags, building up an image out of darkness and creating a richly textured surface.
His paintings of landscapes chilled by winter afforded him the opportunity to employ these techniques in the spirit of mimicking nature most creatively and to greatest effect. Having played the part of the sun, illuminating his subjects from blackness, Courbet’s elemental role also encompassed that of the snowstorm which blustered through his compositions, blanketing Franche-Comté’s limestone ravines and tree-lined watering spots. In La fôret en hiver, Courbet’s varied application of paint perfectly captures the irregularity and complexity of his natural subject. Snow is flaked onto the canvas with a palette knife in its various textures, forming crunchy snow-packed banks and feathery sprays on winter-stripped trees. Cool blue ice is slicked smooth with large soft brushes. Drawing on the palette Courbet had introduced earlier in the decade, the painting is a harmony of tinted whites, steely greys and blues. A gifted colorist, Courbet laced the startling whiteness of the painting with the rusted browns and black of rock and earth which peek darkly from underneath a blanket of snow white.
Landscape painting was the driving force of the second half of Courbet’s career. His passion for the subject was motivated in part by his attachment to his native Franche-Comté. He found great freedom in the unexplored territories of the Jura mountains and delighted in the mystery of the region’s undiscovered places. As Jules-Antoine Castagnary described in his preface to the retrospective exhibition at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1882,‘[T]he landscape according to Courbet does not hand itself over easily. It uses its secrets, its metaphors, and its double meanings carefully, and remains, like the entire oeuvre, fundamentally open to interpretation’ (J. Castagnary, cited in Exposition des oeuvres de Gustave Courbet à l’Ecole des beaux arts, Paris, 1882, pp. 17-18). Partly as a consequence of its unspoiled secrecy, landscape subjects provided Courbet with a powerful platform from which to continue his project of social dissent. The Oak at Flagey, painted in 1864, is a comparable example of a landscape painting saturated with political symbolism. The subject recalls the Tree of Liberty, an icon of the 1848 Revolution and connects the radicalism of this symbol to Courbet’s provincial landscape.
In its tranquility and clarity, La fôret en hiver differs in emotion from the more traditional hunting scenes which emphasize the conflict between the human and the natural. However, close inspection reveals Courbet’s use of a loose, dashed-on brushstroke and spots of color applied with a palette knife which gives an impression of instability. The snow-covered trees appear on the verge of dropping their mantle of white; the water appears to be firm and compact, yet it is not clear if it is completely iced over. This inversion of stability and instability, which is a manifestation of Courbet’s own skeptical philosophy of art and life, steer the eye of the viewer to the figures of the deer. Here, too, Courbet creates a tension: a doe lies peacefully at the edge of the water, while her mate turns to face the forest, on high alert for potential predators.
We are grateful to the Institut Gustave Courbet for confirming the authenticity of this work. It is accompanied by a certificate from the Institut Gustave Courbet dated 24 June 2019, and will be included in their forthcoming Gustave Courbet catalogue raisonné.