A Brook at Le puits noir, near Ornans

Courbet visited the famous grotto near his native Ornans called Le puits noir, or The Black Well, numerous times to paint this stream covered by dense foliage. His return to this motif was inspired in part by its commercial success; in a letter of 1866, he boasted about the large sum he had received for twelve paintings of the site. Despite the humorous myth that he rode his donkey named Gérôme into the gorge and painted outdoors, landscapes such as this one were completed in his studio. The surface is methodically built up in layers, the paint applied thickly with the palette knife and repeatedly scraped back to the dark ground underneath. While some contemporary critics attributed Courbet’s realism to the innovations of the Barbizon school, his landscapes’ lack of atmospheric perspective or a single light source, as well as their palpable painterliness, stand in stark opposition to works by artists such as Corot.