Paysage du Jura

Paysage du Jura (Jura Landscape), painted in 1855 and held at the St. Gallen Museum of Art in Switzerland, belongs to the early phase of Courbet's systematic engagement with the mountain landscapes east of his birthplace. The Jura range — a series of forested limestone ridges running along the Franco-Swiss border — provided scenery of a different character from the gentler Loue valley: steeper, more dramatic, with deeper forests and more exposed rockfaces. The St. Gallen museum's acquisition is geographically appropriate, as the collection lies within the Jura cultural region on the Swiss side of the border. In 1855, the year of the Universal Exhibition in Paris and Courbet's provocative one-man Pavilion of Realism, he was working simultaneously on his most ambitious public statements and these intimate regional landscapes. The Jura paintings were less commercially driven than later landscape production and carry an exploratory quality, as if Courbet was discovering the visual language for mountain landscape that would mature through the following decade.

Mountain landscape in 1855 would show Courbet still developing his palette knife technique, with more brush use than the fully mature works of the 1860s. The forested slopes and rocky outcrops are handled with increasing material confidence, building the geological density that would characterize his best landscape work.