La vendange à Ornans, sous la Roche-du-Mont

Gustave Courbet painted this harvest scene at Ornans in 1849, the same year as his monumental Burial at Ornans — a period of immense creative energy when he was establishing Realism as a programmatic alternative to academic idealism and Romantic escapism. La vendange à Ornans depicts the grape harvest at the limestone cliffs of the Roche-du-Mont above his home town, combining the specific topography of the Franche-Comté with the working bodies of the harvest labourers he insisted were worthy of the same monumental pictorial treatment as mythological heroes. The work belongs to the Museum collection Am Römerholz in Winterthur, which holds several significant Courbet works collected by Oskar Reinhart.

Courbet's handling of the harvest scene demonstrates his technique of building paint from a dark ground, adding light through successive layers of impasto that give his surfaces their characteristic physical weight. The cliffs above Ornans are rendered with geological precision, their pale limestone contrasting with the darker vineyard below.