Landscape with Large Trees
Gustave Courbet · c. 1870 · Cleveland Museum of Art
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From the museum
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. The slightly blurred appearance of this drawing recalls a similar effect common in early landscape photography.
The museum’s own description, in English. Licence: CC0
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Details
- Maker
- Gustave Courbet (French, 1819–1877)
- Date
- c. 1870
- Medium
- black chalk with stumping on brown wove paper
- Dimensions
- Sheet: 38.1 x 52.4 cm (15 x 20 5/8 in.)
- Place of origin
- France
- Held by
- Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland · Not on view
- Credit line
- Dudley P. Allen Fund
Image: Cleveland Museum of Art, CC0
More by Gustave Courbet
Shown in
- Nineteenth-Century French Drawings from the Cleveland Museum of ArtJan 20, 2023 – Jun 11, 2023
- French Drawings from the CollectionDec 13, 1994 – Mar 12, 1995
- Treasures on PaperMay 10, 1988 – Jul 24, 1988
- Seventeenth-, Eighteenth-, and Early Nineteenth-Century Genre and French Prints and DrawingsMay 31, 1979 – Aug 19, 1979
- Year in Review, 1976Feb 1, 1977 – Mar 6, 1977
