Public collection via the Cleveland Museum of Art
AT-00011024About the Artwork
The relatively few drawings that Gustave Courbet produced include the group of landscapes to which this example belongs. Rather than referencing a specific place, it combines a wide range of source material—tourist destinations the artist visited in Switzerland, his home in the Franche-Comté region, and paintings by Claude Lorrain and other historical landscapists. Courbet began by applying a hazy middletone in charcoal before adding detail with a darker, sharpened stick. Although surely appealing to collectors of the time, such works also had ideological significance, presenting an untouched terrain that suggested independence and freedom.
Inscriptions
signed, lower left, in black crayon: Gustave Courbet.
Provenance
?-?: Machwitz Collection, Vitry-le-François, France ?-1976: (Galerie Peter Nathan, Zurich), sold to the Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH) 1976-: Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH
Exhibition history
Year in Review, 1976. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (February 1-March 6, 1977). Courbet und Deutschland. Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany (organizer) (October 19-December 17, 1978); Städel Museum, Franfurt am Main, Germany (January 17-March 18, 1979). Seventeenth-, Eighteenth-, and Early Nineteenth-Century Genre and French Prints and Drawings. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (May 31-August 19, 1979). Treasures on Paper. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (May 10-July 24, 1988). French Drawings from the Collection. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (December 13, 1994-March 12, 1995). Corot, Courbet und die Maler von Barbizon: “Les Amis de la nature.”. Haus der Kunst, Munich (organizer) (February 4-April 21, 1996). Nineteenth-Century French Drawings from the Cleveland Museum of Art. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (January 20-June 11, 2023).
Data retrieved from the Cleveland Museum of Art on October 8, 2026. The museum may have updated its record since.
Quick Overview
- Artist
- Gustave Courbet (French, 1819–1877)
- Date
- c. 1870
- Medium
- black chalk with stumping on brown wove paper
- Dimensions
- Sheet: 38.1 x 52.4 cm (15 x 20 5/8 in.)
- Type
- Drawing
- Classification
- Drawing
- Department
- Drawings
- Credit line
- Dudley P. Allen Fund
- Accession no.
- 1976.18
More by Gustave Courbet in museum collections
Open-access museum record · AT-00011024
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