NARRATOR:
Gustave Courbet once declared that he couldn’t paint an angel because he’d never seen one. He insisted that art should derive from direct unadorned personal experience.
ACTOR (COURBET):
“To be able to translate the customs, ideas, and appearance of my time as I see them—in a word, to create a living art—this has been my aim.”
NARRATOR:
The site of this landscape is the Puits-Noir, or Black Well, a wooded gorge outside Ornans, the rural farming town in eastern France where Courbet was born. Courbet called it a “landscape of profound solitude.” He painted this unspoiled forest with no implied narrative, no dramatically composed elements. It’s as if you’re there with him; he painted everything just as he saw it—you experience the dense textural surfaces of the rocks, the hazy damp air, the reflections and moss on the boulders.
Almost twenty years before he painted this landscape in 1868, Courbet had emerged as a leading proponent of the movement called Realism—the beginning of a new modernism that willfully attempted to provoke the art-viewing public. He rejected the historical and religious subjects, and smooth polished surfaces, long valued by the French art establishment. Many of his most famous works portray the hardships of the rural poor. Critics who expected lofty themes found these works offensive and ugly, and Courbet was denounced for his supposed socialist tendencies. He considered his art a form of social and political protest, declaring:
ACTOR (COURBET):
“Realism is by essence the art of democracy.”
Stream of the Puits-Noir at Ornans
c. 1867-1868
Gustave Courbet (French, 1819-1877)
On View
Courbet likely worked on this canvas during a fall 1868 visit to his birthplace at Ornans in the far eastern reaches of France. The painting depicts a stretch of the river Brème little more than two miles from Ornans itself and bears a scratched-out, over-painted date of “68” in the lower left-hand corner. The picture is thickly painted, worked up with both brush (for the bare, wispy tree branches) and palette knife (for the lichen-crusted limestone cliffs and the frothy water). The painting’s rough, almost mineral surface gives literal form to its rocky subject. Courbet treated the same gorge, transformed by spring, in a painting today at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
Details
- Artist Name: Gustave Courbet (French, 1819-1877)
- Title: Stream of the Puits-Noir at Ornans
- Date: c. 1867-1868
- Medium: Oil on canvas
- Dimensions: 39-3/8 x 59-1/4 in. (100 x 150.5 cm)
- Credit Line: Norton Simon Art Foundation, Gift of Mr. Norton Simon
- Accession Number: M.1976.13.P
- Copyright: © Norton Simon Art Foundation
Object Information
Duke of Wagram, Paris; until 1906;
[Galerie Georges Petit, Paris, by 1906];
[Galerie Heinemann, Munich, by 1908, sold 1911 for 18,500 goldmarks to];
Hugo Schmeil, Dresden (sale, Berlin, Galerie Paul Cassirer, 17 October 1916, lot 8, ill., as Le Ruisseau du Puits Noir d’Ornans, bought in at RM 15,500).
[Emil Baum, Galerie Baum, Munich, sold 13 July 1922 for 870,000 mks to];
Leo Meijer, Amsterdam, sold late 1940s.
Thomas Mitchell (1892-1962), Beverly Hills, by 1948, still in 1950.
[Paul Kantor Gallery, Beverly Hills, stock no. K1724, sold 1965 to];
Norton Simon, gift 1976 to;
Norton Simon Art Foundation.
[Galerie Georges Petit, Paris, by 1906];
[Galerie Heinemann, Munich, by 1908, sold 1911 for 18,500 goldmarks to];
Hugo Schmeil, Dresden (sale, Berlin, Galerie Paul Cassirer, 17 October 1916, lot 8, ill., as Le Ruisseau du Puits Noir d’Ornans, bought in at RM 15,500).
[Emil Baum, Galerie Baum, Munich, sold 13 July 1922 for 870,000 mks to];
Leo Meijer, Amsterdam, sold late 1940s.
Thomas Mitchell (1892-1962), Beverly Hills, by 1948, still in 1950.
[Paul Kantor Gallery, Beverly Hills, stock no. K1724, sold 1965 to];
Norton Simon, gift 1976 to;
Norton Simon Art Foundation.
Austellung Französischer Malerei des XIX. Jahrhunderts
- Galerie Ernst Arnold (Dresden, Germany), 1914-04 to 1914-05
[on loan]
- Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1965-06-17 to 1965-11-17
[on loan]
- Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1970-01-05 to 1971-08-01
[on loan]
- Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1972 to 1973-03-26
Courbet and the Modern Landscape
- J. Paul Getty Museum, 2006-02-21 to 2006-05-14
Masters of Art from 1790 to 1950
- Los Angeles County Fair Association, 1950-09-15 to 1950-10-01
Images of the Landscape, Barbizon and Impressionist Paintings from the Permanent Collection
- Norton Simon Museum, 1987-07-02 to 1989-10-29
Three Centuries of French Art: Selections from The Norton Simon, Inc. Museum of Art and The Norton Simon Foundation_1
- California Palace of the Legion of Honor, 1973-05-03 to 1976-06-15
Reinstallation of South Wing
- Norton Simon Museum, 1993-10-07 to 1995-08-13
- Meier-Graefe, Courbet, pl. 32
- Chu, Petra Ten-Doesschate, Art Journal, fig. 2 p. 42
- Meier-Graefe, Julius, Corot und Courbet, 1912, p. 161
- Fernier, Robert, La Vie et L'Oeuvre de Gustave Courbet: Catalogue Raisonné, Peintures 1819-1865, 1977, no. 196
- Arts Council of Great Britain, Gustave Courbet 1819-1877, 1978,
- Morse, John D., Old Master Paintings in North America, 1979, p. 69
- Masterpieces from the Norton Simon Museum, 1989, p. 120
- Eitner, Lorenz, The Collections of the National Gallery of Art Systemic Catalogue. French Paintings of the Nineteenth Century. Part I: Before Impressionism, 2000, no. 22, fig. 2 pp. 109-112
- Thomas, Greg M., Art and Ecology in Nineteenth-Century France: The Landscape of Théodore Rousseau, 2000, fig. 44 p. 75
- Eyerman, Charlotte; Dominique de Font-Réaulx and Mary Morton, Courbet and the Modern Landscape, 2006, plate 13 pp. 68, 74
- Brettell, Richard R. and Stephen F. Eisenman, Nineteenth-Century Art in the Norton Simon Museum, volume 1, 2006,
- Campbell, Sara, Collector Without Walls: Norton Simon and His Hunt for the Best, 2010, cat. 268 p. 278
Additional Artwork by Artist
Image reproduction permission may be granted for scholarly or arts related commercial use. All image requests, regardless of their intended purpose, should be submitted via the reproduction request form.
Images may be protected by copyright and other intellectual property rights. Additional permission may be required.
Approved requests for the reproduction of an image will receive a contract detailing all fees and conditions of use of the image. Upon receipt of both the signed contract and full payment, the Office of Rights and Reproductions will provide the image. A complimentary copy of the published material must be provided to the Norton Simon Museum.