Landscape in the Jura         

Gustave Courbet 

submitted by Peter Geraghty

Gustave Courbet painted Landscape in the Jura around 1864.  It’s an oil painting, 28 ½ inches x 36 inches and it’s in the collection of Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.  Our examination of some of the elements of this painting, its forms, textures and colors will tell us about Courbet’s relationship to this landscape.

Gustave Courbet painted Landscape in the Jura around 1864.  It’s an oil painting, 28 ½ inches x 36 inches and it’s in the collection of Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.  We can examine some of the 'formal elements' of this painting, its forms, textures and colors and see what this might (but only might) tell us about Courbet’s relationship to this landscape.

Our attention is first of all drawn to the shape of this valley.  In section it is like a bowl, flat and horizontal at the bottom, almost vertical up near the rim, with moderate slopes in between.  This shape is repeated three or four times and as it moves deeper into the painting we follow along the course of the stream to our destination, the village up at the head of the valley.  The succession of bowl shapes, those on one side offset from those on the other, tells us about the rhythmic meandering of the stream and invites us to stroll along the edge of the meadow to the village, marked by its vertical steeple.  The village is settled in a nest in the landscape, protected by gentle slopes of forest and rock. As we take this walk we may imagine that we are on a path that Courbet often travelled as he visited his friends and family.  The painting tells us about Courbet’s real home in the Jura, among farmers and shepherds and blacksmiths.

The mountainous forms of the landscape exhibit a strength and indifference to the people who live on the valley floor; the textures of the landscape present a rugged defiance; they insist on the preeminence of nature.  The shrubs on the mountainside are bristly and thorny; the exposed rock faces are broken, jagged and crumbling; the stream bed is rough and irregular.  These textures tell us that here, only the most persevering can make a living.  It’s not hard to imagine that Courbet wants to tell his bourgeois admirers, bankers and merchants enjoying the chandeliers and gaslights of Paris, that this is where he was born and if you see him as obstinate and resistant, then here, among rocks and clear streams is where he grew up.  The Jura is his true home and he is proud of it and its people.

While much of this landscape is rough and abrasive, the sunlit meadow is flat, horizontal and serene.  It’s an optimistic oasis in the midst of a somber juniper green wilderness. The colors of the meadow are an energetic yellow and a restful reassuring green. These brightly colored fields offer a welcoming sunny place where we can enjoy the calmness of springtime between the black storms of winter and the red heat of summer.  The blue sky above is harmoniously reflected in the stream below.  Here are the colors of comfort and peace.

All this tells us about our own relationship to Courbet’s painting, but does it really tell us about Courbet’s picture of the landscape?  We might like to think so but we have to remember that we are looking at his painting through the cool analytical lens of ‘formal elements’.  We are using a tool that was put together at the same moment that Western art was beginning to move towards abstraction. Between Courbet's painting in the 1860s and the advent of abstraction some forty or fifty years later, there is so much that happened to the set of ideas that pushed Western Art forward. This period marks a watershed between what we now see as 'traditional' art and what we call 'modern' art. It's important to ask whether or not Courbet and his contemporaries had in mind the use of formal elements to guide their work. Should we be trying to figure out what we think of Courbet's painting or what Courbet thought of his painting?