Landscape, with the Chatel St Denis, Scey-en-Varais

Gustave Courbet painted this 1873 landscape of the Chatel St-Denis area near Scey-en-Varais during his Swiss exile following the Paris Commune. Scey-en-Varais was in the Franche-Comté region near the Swiss border — Courbet's home territory — and the landscapes he painted in these final years return obsessively to the limestone valleys, clear streams, and dense forests he had first painted in the 1840s. Exile gave these landscapes an elegiac quality; they were memories as much as observations, the painter mourning his lost homeland through the act of painting its characteristic topography. The Victoria and Albert Museum's holding connects this late work to the significant British appreciation of Courbet that had grown since the 1860s.

Courbet's palette knife and loaded brush technique give the landscape a physical substance that matches the geological weight of the Franche-Comté limestone. Rock faces, tree trunks, and water are built with thick, decisive strokes. The palette reflects the cool, clear quality of this region's light — blue-greys, deep greens, pale limestone whites.