Gustave Courbet

Mme. X ((Kaufmann) and sold: Paris, Hôtel Drouot, May 5, 1902, lot 15, illustrated)
Mme. Esnault-Pelterie (acquired from the above)
Hunick and Scherjon, Amsterdam
Private Collection
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Louis Rouart, "Collection de Madame Esnault-Pelterie," Les Arts, June 1906, p. 20 (as Effet de neige)
Robet Fernier, La vie et L'Oeuvre de Gustave Courbet, Lausanne, 1978, vol. II, p. 166, no. 866, illustrated
Pierre Courthion, L'opera completa di Courbet, Milan, 1985, p. 121, no. 855

The following condition report was kindly provided by Simon Parkes Art Conservation, Inc.: This painting is in excellent condition. The canvas has been lined, the paint layer is stable and the paint itself is well textured. It is unlikely that more texture would've existed prior to the lining. The paint layer has been cleaned and varnished. There are a handful of tiny retouches in the sky in the upper left which are most likely diminishing the warm ground color which Courbet tends to leave visible, and so the retouches may not be necessary. Overall the condition is excellent.
"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."

Gustave Courbet painted La Forêt en hiver during the late 1860s, in his native Jura region of France where he returned to spend most winters away from the strains of Paris.  Snow scenes, which occur only infrequently in French landscape painting before Courbet made them one of his signature themes, offered him an opportunity to flaunt his originality in facing nature's truths and at the same time to experiment with the exceptional color schemes and technical bravura which had increasingly become the focus of all his art. 

Courbet made his provincial origins and his personal biography an  important part of his artistic identity, frequently stressing how growing up in the Jura uplands had given him a freedom from the conventions of Paris and an ability to see the landscape more directly than any of his urban colleagues.  Cold, wet winters are the reality of Ornans, and as early as 1857 Courbet began painting snow scenes into the backgrounds of the Jura hunting themes that absorbed him at that date (a kind of boast about the success of those paintings is contained in La Forêt en hiver in the two roe deer at the picture's heart).  But it was only during the especially heavy winters between 1865 and 1868 that Courbet addressed the winter terrain in its own right. In between, he had spent several months painting on the Normandy coast, where the challenge of creating pictures out of flat beaches and endless horizons had pushed him to breathtaking abstraction in his use of color and his manipulation of paint textures.  Courbet himself was surprised that his coast and wave paintings should be so well-received back in Paris, and in his letters to friends he frequently bragged about how easily they sold.

A good deal of Courbet's Normandy experience lies behind the best of his 1860s snow scenes, despite the fundamental differences in the two landscape subjects.  For the snow paintings, Courbet returned to real sites that he had painted earlier in his career as well as to more generalized compositions that he developed in the studio out of favored Jura motifs -- bold trees, interlocked hillsides, and the ubiquitous flowing streams in the lee of the Alps.  For La Forêt en hiver, Courbet adopted a relatively conventional Forest of Fontainebleau schema of strong foreground tree trunks overlapping dense, impenetrable foliage, and then he made the familiar construction unforgettably his own: the striking palette of salmon pinks set against quiet turquoise and steely blues, and then worked in innumerable tints throughout the dominantly white surface which has no counterpart in contemporary landscape painting. Carefully, but with a flecked and dabbed technique that seems entirely spontaneous, Courbet captured the sensations of a dozen snow effects,  From the wet, slushy snow sliding down the sunstruck tree trunks, through the cold, thickly bundled snow accumulated on willow leaves, to the effervescent flutter of individual flakes swept around and over the slender central saplings, Courbet painted snow more convincingly than any artist before him.  His certain command of the familiar landscape structure in La Forêt en hiver freed him to paint with remarkable originality.

La Forêt en hiver belonged for many years to Mme. Albert Esnault-Pelterie who, in about a decade at the opening of the twentieth-century, built a legendary, highly focused collection of paintings and colored drawings by Delacroix, Daumier, Millet, Corot, and Courbet. 

This catalouge entry was written by Alexandra Murphy.