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Lot Essay
Gustave Courbet depicts a stream, apparently untouched by human activity, at the bottom of a ravine which flows peacefully through overhanging trees. Transparent silvery water can be seen gracefully rolling over a bed of rocks. A larger version of the present painting which resided in the Havemeyer collection before being gifted to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, is dated to 1855. The likely original plein-air study for that work is now in the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. When Courbet exhibited the larger work at the Exposition Universelle in 1855 he identified the wooded gorge in The Stream as Le ruisseau du Puits-noir, vallee de la Loue (Stream of the Black Well, Valley of the Loue), a famous site around four kilmoeters northeast of his native Ornans, accessible only by footpath. Long interested in the natural history of this region, including its geology, Courbet was scrupulously accurate in depicting the setting. Such a depiction would evoke a yearning popular during the nineteenth century, a romantic desire for a peaceful, restorative retreat from the rigors of modern life.
As Lorenz Eitner observes of this spot, '…it had a special importance for him. Judging from his own description of it as a "landscape of profound solitude" and from the titles of Solitude and Covert that he gave to later versions of this motif, it was the unspoilt, sheltered privacy of the place that attracted him. The enclosed refuge of this dell, filled with silent life and the sound of water, appealed to the quietly receptive observer in him, the stealthy hunter who was as much a part of his artistic personality as the more familiar boisterous extrovert'. (L. Eitner, French Paintings of the Nineteenth Century: Part 1 Before Impressionism, The Collections of the National Gallery of Art Systematic Catalgoue, New York and Oxford, 2000, p. 110).
The present work is accompanied by a certificate from the Institut Gustave Courbet, and will be included in their forthcoming Gustave Courbet catalogue raisonné.
As Lorenz Eitner observes of this spot, '…it had a special importance for him. Judging from his own description of it as a "landscape of profound solitude" and from the titles of Solitude and Covert that he gave to later versions of this motif, it was the unspoilt, sheltered privacy of the place that attracted him. The enclosed refuge of this dell, filled with silent life and the sound of water, appealed to the quietly receptive observer in him, the stealthy hunter who was as much a part of his artistic personality as the more familiar boisterous extrovert'. (L. Eitner, French Paintings of the Nineteenth Century: Part 1 Before Impressionism, The Collections of the National Gallery of Art Systematic Catalgoue, New York and Oxford, 2000, p. 110).
The present work is accompanied by a certificate from the Institut Gustave Courbet, and will be included in their forthcoming Gustave Courbet catalogue raisonné.