Stormy sea

Painted in 1870 and now in the Musée d'Orsay, this seascape represents Courbet's engagement with the turbulent northern sea in full storm — a subject he returned to in the final years before his imprisonment. The stormy sea was a Romantic subject par excellence, from Turner to Géricault, but Courbet's approach to it differs from Romantic tradition in its insistence on the sea as pure material force rather than sublime metaphor. The year 1870 was catastrophic for France, and Courbet's stormy sea paintings from this year have sometimes been read in retrospect as registers of national crisis, though Courbet himself would have resisted such literary readings.

Storm conditions require the most energetic application of Courbet's palette knife technique: the churned, chaotic sea surface is built through multiple overlapping strokes in different directions, creating a physically turbulent paint surface. Grey storm sky dominates the upper register with minimal tonal variety. White-caps and foam are laid in with swift, decisive impasto.