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Provenance: with Salander O'Reilly Galleries, New York, 2003, when acquired from by the present owner.

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Exhibited: New York, Salander O'Reilly Gallery, 19th Century European Paintings, February 2003, no. 17, as 'Waves'.

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Notes: THE PROPERTY OF AN ENGLISH PRIVATE COLLECTOR
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This picture is one of a series of some fifty paintings of stormy seas and skies, mostly executed by Courbet around 1869-1870 on the beaches around the Normandy town of Étretat.
Étretat also attracted other artists such as Eugène Boudin and Claude Monet, but none devoted themselves so wholeheartedly to such a powerful representation of raw nature. Courbet's wave paintings have an abstract quality, in which the bluey grey colours almost dissolve into each other. Set against a flat picture plane, Courbet's palette knife techique accentuates surface colour and a general sense of mass over form, and brings the waves vividly to life. The composition is not bounded on any side, with the sea occupying the entire width of the canvas: the viewer is immersed in the sea which, depicted in frontal perspective, almost leaps out of the canvas.

As in this work, Courbet often included either a small ship on the horizon, or a figure in the foreground, as Romantic symbols of man's insignificance in the face of nature. The sky is here not altogether as menacing as the sea, but the low horizon and the ship which break it, lead the viewer's gaze over the crest of the crashing wave, and towards the vast but more subdued emptiness of a sky softened with shades of evening light.

The authenticity of this painting has been confirmed by Sarah Faunce, who will include it in her forthcoming catalogue on the artist. Jean-Jacques Fernier believes it to have been jointly executed by Gustave Courbet and Cherubino Pata, and will include it in his forthcoming supplement to the Courbet catalogue raisonné under the section 'oeuvres en collaboration'.