River and Rocks

River and Rocks, painted in 1873 and held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, belongs to the final phase of Courbet's career — his years in Swiss exile following the Commune, when he continued to paint prolifically despite declining health and financial difficulties. The Franche-Comté landscape of rivers and limestone formations that he had painted throughout his career remained central to his work even in exile, as if the specific terrain of his childhood had become so embedded in his pictorial imagination that it could be summoned without direct observation. By 1873 Courbet was producing river and rock scenes with an established fluency, working quickly within a compositional vocabulary he had spent decades developing. The Met's acquisition of this late work acknowledges its place in the sustained narrative of Courbet's geological landscape painting.

Oil on canvas, this late landscape shows the continued authority of Courbet's palette knife technique in the rock surfaces, combined with more fluid brush passages for the water's movement. The late works sometimes show a slightly looser, more expedient execution than his mid-career masterpieces, but maintain the essential commitment to material observation that characterized his best work.