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PROPERTY OF A SWISS PRIVATE COLLECTOR

PAYSAGE DE MER

PAYSAGE DE MER

38.2 by 46.3cm., 15 by 18 1/4 in.

signed and dated Gustave Courbet. / 66 l.r.

oil on canvas

The authenticity of this work has been confirmed by Jean-Jacques Fernier, who will include it in his critical Courbet catalogue raisonné to be published by the Fondation Wildenstein.

PROVENANCE

Acquired by the family of the present owner by 1950; thence by descent

NOTE

Although dated 66, the present work almost certainly numbers among the series of seascapes painted by Courbet between early September and late November 1865 on the Normandy coast. In a letter to his patron and friend Alfred Bruyas early in January 1866, Courbet declared, 'I did thirty-eight paintings in that place, including twenty-five seascapes, and twenty-five autumn skies, one more extraordinary and free than the next' (Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, ed., Letters of Gustave Courbet, Chicago and London, 1992, p. 273).

As early as 1841 the vastness of the sea had had a profound effect on Courbet. Now, some twenty-four years later, he was absorbed by the motif that would come to number among his most recognised and influential. He rejected the specific and narrative element present in his landscapes (see lot 329) to contrive a new genre that heralded the future of French landscape painting. Commenting on a variant from this series housed in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, Hélène Toussaint notes, 'his 'sea landscapes' are chromatic variations of colours and values and have no other significance' (Gustave Courbet 1819-1877, Arts Council of Great Britain, 1978, exh. cat., p. 161). Capturing the infinite momentary shifts in weather, Courbet's series depicted the same view at different times of the day and in varying weather conditions, a practice later embraced most famously by Monet who, like Boudin and Whistler, spent time painting with Courbet in Normandy. The present work most closely relates to a painting dated 65, titled Deauville, no. 524 in Robert Fernier, La vie et l'oeuvre de Gustave Courbet, Paris, 1977.

Simultaneously influencing one another, Whistler's reductive Harmony in Blue and Silver, Trouville (fig. 1), executed while he was staying with Courbet, reveres the older artist as the founder of the new landscape painting, picturing him in the lower left of the work. The present painting is more descriptive than Whistler's Harmony, however both share the predominant three bands of land, sea and sky flattened against the picture plane.

The caricaturist G. Randon commented: 'As God has created the sky and the earth from nothing, so has Courbet drawn his seascapes from nothing or almost nothing: with three colours from his palette, three brushstrokes - as he knows how to do it - and there is an infinite sea and sky!'

Fig. 1, James McNeill Whistler, Harmony in Blue and Silver: Trouville, 1865, Isabella Gardner Stewart Museum, Boston