Lot 87
  • 87

Gustave Courbet

Estimate
400,000 - 600,000 USD
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Description

  • Gustave Courbet
  • Falaises d'Étretat
  • signed G. Courbet and dated 69 (lower right)
  • oil on canvas
  • 25 5/8 by 31 7/8 in.
  • 65 by 80.9 cm

Provenance

Possibly, Georges Lutz (by 1882)
Galerie Roque, Paris
Galerie Tooth, London
F. W. Burnham, London (acquired from the above in 1955)
Galerie Thomas Agnew and Sons, Ltd., London (acquired from the above in 1977)

Exhibited

Possibly, Paris, École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts, Exposition des œuvres de Gustave Courbet à l'Ecole des beaux-arts, May 1882, no. 189 (not included in the catalogue)

Literature

Possibly, Robert Fernier, La vie et l'oeuvre de Gustave Courbet, catalogue raisonné,  Lausanne and Paris, 1977, vol. II, p. 326 (not illustrated)
Pierre Courthion, Tout l'oeuvre peint de Courbet, Paris, 1987, p. 112, no. 690, illustrated

Condition

The following condition report was kindly provided by Simon Parkes Art Conservation, Inc.: Although this work seems to have a fairly recent varnish to the surface, it does not seem to have been recently cleaned. While it is certainly attractive and certainly could be hung in its current state, there is a brighter and cooler palette with more depth beneath a layer of yellowed varnish. There are no damages or retouches of any note. Courbet used a palette knife to paint, and sometimes there are small incidental spots which remain after the paint is applied; a few tiny dots of retouch have been added to the sky that may address some of these incidental spots. The yellowed varnish is quite visible in many areas, but the work is extremely attractive at present and is in beautiful condition.
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

Catalogue Note

Courbet visited the Normandy coast in 1865 and many of the seascapes that he painted during this prolific stay were exhibited in at the Rond-point de l’Alma in 1867, firmly establishing his reputation as a master of the genre. Partly because of this exhibition, these paintings became very lucrative for Courbet and he returned to the area in the following years to complete a number of commissions. The works from this period are varied in their depictions of the sea, a privileged subject in Courbet’s oeuvre.

During his last visit in 1869, he produced more than twenty-nine seascapes, of which the present work is surely one. Many were later finished in his Paris studio or else he went on to complete variants of existing compositions (see Étretat: Les Falaises, 1870, sold in these rooms for a record price of $3,749,000, November 6, 2013, lot 40). During this visit, he wrote to his family in September: “We are very comfortable in Étretat… It is a charming little resort place. There are rocks here that are bigger than Ornans, quite curious” (Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, Letters of Gustave Courbet, London, 1992, p. 352). That same year, Courbet contributed two works to the Paris Salon that would bring him enormous acclaim, The Stormy Sea (also called The Wave) and The Cliff at Étretat after the Storm, both of which are in the collection of the Musée d’Orsay.

The dramatic cliffs of Étretat have inspired artists for centuries; Eugène Delacroix, Claude Monet, and Eugène Boudin among them. Each of these artists brought a unique perspective to the convergence of earth and sea and sky, but it was Gustave Courbet’s rigorous pictorial interpretations that would inspire the visits of countless later artists.  When Monet visited the region with plans to create a series of seascapes in 1883, the year following Courbet’s École des Beaux-Arts retrospective featuring a number of his Étretat compositions, he wrote: “I reckon on doing a big canvas on the cliff of Étretat, although it’s terribly audacious of me to do that after Courbet who did it so well, but I’ll try to do it differently” (as quoted in John House, Monet: Nature into Art, New Haven, 1986, p. 23).  Monet’s Cliffs at Etretat (1885, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Instiute, fig. 1), clearly shows his Impressionist departure from Courbet’s treatment of the same subject, whose carefully observed color palette and idiosyncratic, expert mark-making stands in sharp contrast. Courbet does not shy away from using his palette knife to render the sparkling sea and craggy cliff face; a grassy sun-struck plateau atop the cliff is smoothly brushed; a jumble of gravel in the foreground is ingeniously stippled; a whole arsenal of painterly techniques has been deployed in this composition, which stands as a testament to Courbet’s painterly nerve.