View of a Rough Sea Near a Cliff,

after 1873

<p>I have always found something about Courbet’s marine views so poignant. Courbet captured in his “landscapes of the sea” his profound, visceral response to the French coast, suggesting the power of the movement of the tides with thick strokes of liquid color that evoke the ocean’s roar and briny mists. All the more touching, then, are works like this one, which he made in exile—having been forced to leave his homeland after his participation in the short-lived socialist government of Paris known as the Commune—painting from memory shores to which he would never return.</p> <p>Caroline Harris, Associate Director for Education, Princeton University Art Museum<br></p>

Gustave Courbet paid a heavy price for his political engagement with the Paris Commune of 1871. Following its defeat, he was tried for his part in dismantling the column honoring Napoleon in Place Vendôme, sentenced to a jail term, and held responsible for the replacement costs. After his release, Courbet traveled to Switzerland, where he spent the rest of his life in order to avoid bankruptcy. There he worked — often with ­collaborators — on paintings that would sell well, vainly hoping to discharge his debt and return to France. Among his subjects, ironically, were seascapes. Some of his earliest efforts dated from 1865, when he was in Normandy painting portraits of vacationing Parisians. He began to paint seascapes during the winter, too, in Paris, based on motifs from his summer trips to the seashore. He first visited Étretat in 1869, and sometimes included its white cliffs overlooking the sea in subsequent seascapes. The cliffs survive in a generalized form in <em>View of a Rough Sea near a Cliff</em> and in <em>Boats on the Beach, Étretat</em> (National Gallery, Washington, D.C.), which has been dated 1872–75. Courbet’s clients sometimes returned seascapes with the request that he add boats; the Princeton painting must therefore be an "unimproved" seascape that concentrates on the powerful waves and wind-driven clouds scuttling across the sky on a stormy day. The market for seascapes was driven both by the fashion for vacations by the sea and by social and scientific advances and their reflections in literature. In 1866, Victor Hugo brought the world of the fishermen of the English Channel islands to a wide public in his novel <em>Toilers of the Sea </em>— with its unforgettable battle between man and giant octopus. Earlier, in 1861, Jules Michelet had published <em>The Sea</em>, in which the ocean itself is the protagonist.