Landscape with Rocky Cliffs and a Waterfall

Landscape with Rocky Cliffs and a Waterfall, painted in 1872 and now in the Rijksmuseum, was made during Courbet's exile in Switzerland following his imprisonment and financial ruin after the Paris Commune. Courbet had been held responsible for the destruction of the Vendôme Column and fined an enormous sum; he fled to La Tour-de-Peilz in Switzerland rather than face further prosecution, and it was here that he painted the Swiss landscape subjects that dominated his final years. The Swiss landscapes — waterfalls, rocky gorges, forests — suited his heavy palette-knife technique and his commitment to the dense materiality of natural subjects, even as his personal circumstances grew increasingly desperate. His insistence on painting only what could be directly observed, refusing academic idealization, was the essential precondition for Impressionism.

Courbet applied paint with palette knife as well as brush, building up thick impasto surfaces that give the rocky cliffs and waterfall a sculptural physicality matching the weight of their natural originals. His palette centers on dark earth tones and rich blacks in the rock faces, contrasting with the white foam of falling water — a tonal drama that rejected academic smoothness in favor of direct material encounter.