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Dimensions: 71 by 90cm., 28 by 35 1/2 in.

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Provenance: PROPERTY OF A EUROPEAN PRIVATE COLLECTOR

Won Adens Collection, Basel
Cassani Collection, Milan
Galleria Lorenzelli, Bergamo
Paolo Stramezzi Collection, Crema
Marta Rabagliati Collection, Milan; thence by descent to the present owner

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Exhibited: Berlin, Galerie Wertheim, Gustave Courbet, 1930, no. 48

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Notes: Courbet embarked on his famous series of wave paintings following his visit to Etretat on the Normandy coast in August 1869.

The depiction of the sea from the shore was by no means a new concept; it had been popular with the seventeenth-century Dutch masters, and during the 19th Century was the subject of many works by Bonnington and the French academic painters. But whereas these artists always explored the sea in terms of its relation to man, or as the backdrop to mythological scenes such as the birth of Venus, Courbet ignored these precedents and pioneered a new genre that eliminated any sign of human existence.

As Zola remarked of one of Courbet's wave paintings: 'Do not expect a symbolic work in the manner of Cabanel or Baudry - some nude woman, with skin as pearly as a shell, who bathes in a sea of agate. Courbet has simply painted a wave' (Emile Zola, 'L'Ecole française de peinture a l'Exposition de 1878', Emile Zola, Salons, eds. Hemmings and Niess, Geneva, 1959, p. 201). As if cocking a snook at 'traditional' imagery of the sea, Courbet substitutes any human forms the viewer might have expected to see on the beach for a few lone boulders.

In lieu of a narrative, Courbet relies on the inherent expression and power that he perceived in nature. By applying the paint in overlapping layers with a palette knife to give expression to the rolling waves, he brilliantly captured the immediacy and physicality of his subject. Combining this with the absence of human presence and the vastness of the infinite horizon, he was able to evoke a sense of awe, melancholy, wonder and thoughtfulness in the viewer.

Unlike some of his violent crashing waves observed close-up and filling the entire picture plane, here the wave is less threatening, gentler, even rhythmical, with the next whitecap already rising to take its place. Dated 1871, it is likely that the present work was executed after Courbet's involvement with the Paris Commune, and that the gentler mood of the painting is a reflection of Courbet's longing for calm and stability after the upheavals of the months past.