Gustave Courbet
French, 1819 – 1877
La Dent de Jaman, about 1874
Oil on canvas
19 3/4 x 24 1/8 in. (50.2 x 61.3 cm.)
28 3/16 x 32 3/8 x 3 in. (71.6 x 82.2 x 7.6 cm.) (frame)
Bequest of Mrs. Blakemore Wheeler  1964.31.5

French Expatriate
Courbet was forced to flee his native France in 1873 after being charged with the destruction of the Vendôme Column during the Commune uprising in Paris in 1871. He fled across the border to Switzerland, living in this fisherman’s cottage on the shores of Lake Geneva for the last four years of his life. Notice the roughly textured paint where Courbet has used a palette knife to depict the stucco walls of his cottage and the ragged edges of the celebrated snow-capped mountain peak known as the Dent de Jaman.