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Lot Essay
The changing seasons provided Gustave Courbet with a wide and diverse range of subjects for his landscape paintings with his winter landscapes standing out as the most memorable. Indeed, no 19th century artist captured the feeling of winter, evoking the cold, and the texture of snow and ice more successfully than Gustave Courbet. Throughout his career, the snowy terrain around Ornans served as the backdrop for many of his most well-known winter scenes. 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 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.’(G. Courbet 2008 exh. cat 228 citing the preface to retrospective). In his beloved countryside Courbet painted crystalline, icy landscapes mostly devoid of any human presence, and when he introduced a living creature, it was usually a fox, a stag or a hunter tracking his prey (fig. 1).
In a snow covered forest, under a giant tree, a doe sits by her sleeping fawn under the watchful eye of an alert and powerful stag. 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 Franche-Comté and later, during the artist’s self-imposed exile, in The Alps. Courbet's forest visions evoke calmness and solitude, a personal glimpse into the habitat of a creature in his natural environment. Courbet himself a huntsman, with a passion that was enhanced by several hunting trips to German reserves, found peace in the forest. These snowy landscapes were among the favourites of collectors of Courbet's hunting genre paintings and gained him a particular reputation in the 1860's.
As 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.’(G. Courbet 2008 exh. cat 228 citing the preface to retrospective). In his beloved countryside Courbet painted crystalline, icy landscapes mostly devoid of any human presence, and when he introduced a living creature, it was usually a fox, a stag or a hunter tracking his prey (fig. 1).
In a snow covered forest, under a giant tree, a doe sits by her sleeping fawn under the watchful eye of an alert and powerful stag. 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 Franche-Comté and later, during the artist’s self-imposed exile, in The Alps. Courbet's forest visions evoke calmness and solitude, a personal glimpse into the habitat of a creature in his natural environment. Courbet himself a huntsman, with a passion that was enhanced by several hunting trips to German reserves, found peace in the forest. These snowy landscapes were among the favourites of collectors of Courbet's hunting genre paintings and gained him a particular reputation in the 1860's.