Landscape with Large Trees
Gustave Courbet (French, 1819–1877)
c. 1870
- Medium
- black chalk with stumping on brown wove paper
- Classification
- Drawing
- Dimensions
- Sheet: 38.1 x 52.4 cm (15 x 20 5/8 in.)
- Culture
- France, 19th century
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, Drawings
- Credit line
- Dudley P. Allen Fund
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Little Ones profiles and older: it shows gentle subjects for the very young. How works are placed
View at the Cleveland Museum of Art
About this work
The relatively few drawings that Gustave Courbet produced include the group of landscapes to which this example belongs. Rather than referencing a specific place, it combines a wide range of source material—tourist destinations the artist visited in Switzerland, his home in the Franche-Comté region, and paintings by Claude Lorrain and other historical landscapists. Courbet began by applying a hazy middletone in charcoal before adding detail with a darker, sharpened stick. Although surely appealing to collectors of the time, such works also had ideological significance, presenting an untouched terrain that suggested independence and freedom.
