Grotto of Sarrazine / Courbet
Gustave Courbet
French, about 1864
Oil on canvas
19 11/16 x 23 5/8 in.
2004.47
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Questions for Teaching

• Compare this landscape to Landscape with a Calm by Poussin. How is it different? How is it similar?

• Compare this landscape with Landscape Near Ornans, also by Courbet. What similarities and differences can you find? How is Courbet's point of view in this work different from Landscape Near Ornans?

• Which elements of art do you think the artist is most interested in? Where do you see these elements? (As typical with Courbet's style, texture and space are among the most prominent elements featured in the work. Courbet used his signature technique in this painting, applying and scraping off paint with a palette knife in order to mimic the cavern's colorful, textured surfaces. Though his use of space in the work is notably flattened, Courbet designed the rock face to swirl around a tunnel-like entrance, drawing attention to the back of the cave.)

• It is difficult to find the foreground, middle ground, and background in this painting because it is such a shallow space. Why do you think Courbet created this image so close-up with no surrounding details? What do you think he was most interested in? (Courbet flattened the space and his chief interest was with the paint surface on the canvas and not the depth of the cave.)

• How did the artist create the illusion of depth in this painting? (Rather than using zones of recession and atmospheric perspective to create depth in the work, Courbet created a shallow depth for the cave with the curved lines that arch from the lower left to the upper right of the painting. These swirls of rock face and the thin blue stream running from the left-hand corner of the canvas lead the eye into the blackness that is the center of the grotto.)

• While there are no human figures in the painting, Courbet has included the presence of man. What do you see that shows man's presence in this cave? (The metal railing or gate along the wall of the cave.)

Background Information

Through a dynamic composition and radical painting techniques, Gustave Courbet emphasized the specific qualities of this cave located in his native region of the Jura Mountains in southeastern France. The intense interest in the rock surface as well as the severely cropped, decidedly modern composition, resonated with contemporary photography, such as the anonymous daguerreotype Study of Rocks. Earthy hues and textures swirl around a tunnel-like entrance, drawing attention to the back of the cave. Two boulders stand before the opening, several feet from a wall hugged by the delicate railing. Courbet used palette knives and brushes to apply and scrape off paint, mimicking the cavern's colorful, textured surfaces.

Like many tourists and scientists of his day, Courbet was probably drawn to the grotto as an interesting cave formation. In the mid-1860s he frequently painted caves as a means to explore composition and technique freely, and to demonstrate his strong belief that artistic subjects should be rooted in one's lived experience. He saw the basis of Realism as "the denial of the ideal," the rejection of established classical subjects and a refined style. He chose instead, to paint only what he could see. Courbet's landscapes of the 1860s mark a change in the tradition of viewing the land as an experience of reading and interpreting; his work was more about a tactile performance in paint. His landscapes planted the seeds of modernist painting and defined the artistic issue of the paint surface that would concern the Impressionists and subsequent artists throughout the following century.

About the Artist
"I, who believe that every artist should be his own teacher, cannot dream of setting myself up as a professor....[F]or each artist, [art is] nothing but the talent issuing from his own inspiration and his own studies of tradition." —Gustave Courbet.

Emphatic in his opinions and constantly defying authority, Gustave Courbet believed that "painting is an essentially concrete art, and can consist only of representation of real and existing things." After leaving rural Ornans for Paris, he was most influenced by the 17th-century Spanish and Dutch paintings he saw in the Louvre and on his trip to Holland in 1847. By 1850 he was shocking the public with the Realism and scale of his paintings. In December of that year, he exhibited three huge canvases of contemporary peasant life at the Salon; their enormous size was traditionally reserved for history paintings of more "important" subjects.

Five years later, when his painting, The Studio of the Painter: A Real Allegory of Seven Years of My Artistic Life, was refused by the Salon's Universal Exhibition of 1855, Courbet erected his own exhibition, Le Réalisme, in a tent and charged admission. The enormous Studio was unique not only because of its scale, but also because within the scene, Courbet chose to define himself as a landscape painter at a time when landscape painting was still perceived as a subject inferior to figural painting. Courbet accompanied his Réalisme exhibition with a "Realist Manifesto," a brochure that articulated his credo of painting— "to create a living art." The exhibition put him on the artistic map, and the ambitious artist gained attention, if not commercial success, by mounting the show in proximity to the Salon's Universal Exhibition.

From the beginning of his artistic career, Courbet promoted himself as the opposite of the urban, sophisticated, modern Parisian. He claimed to be an outsider, a mountain man, physically robust, dynamic, and above all, independent. He exaggerated his provincial accent and behavioral traits and fashioned himself into a somewhat brutish, naive bohemian, and a populist. His political leanings would lead to his demise. Courbet spent most of the 1870s in a state of political persecution, and he spent the last four years of his life in exile in Switzerland escaping a French government determined to make him pay for his role in the destructive civil war known as the Commune (1871). Despite the difficult circumstances, in Switzerland he painted a number of accomplished landscapes with melancholic tones.

As a landscape painter, the modernity of Courbet's work resides in his radically innovative painting techniques (particularly, his use the palette knife) and his dramatic compositions. Drawing inspiration from natural motifs and reacting against the classical tradition, he reset the course of French landscape painting to embrace immediacy, vitality, and painterly self-expression. For Courbet, landscape was something he knew because he had experienced it. As a boy, Courbet had hiked, fished and hunted in the valleys around Ornans, learning the land with more than just his eyes, but with his feet and hands. His sensory style of painting and independent spirit would inspire future generations of French artists, including Édouard Manet, Camille Pissarro, and Paul Cézanne.