Further images
“His tide comes from the bottom of the ages, all its ragged sky, and its livid harshness. It hits you right in the chest, and you must retreat. The whole room feels the spray.” — Paul Cézanne
Provenance
Henri Hecht, Paris (until 1882)
M.L. Guillaumet (acquired from the above, May 1882)
Mrs. M.L. Guillaumet (acquired from the above, her husband)
Sale: Palais Galliéra, Paris, March 30, 1965, lot 241
Private Collection, United States (by 1979)
Stoppenbach and Delestre, London
Salander-O'Reilly Galleries, New York
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1989
Exhibited
Paris, L'École des Beaux-Arts, Exposition des Oeuvres de Gustave Courbet, 1882, no. 109 (as Temps d'orage, lent by Henri Hecht)
New York, Salander-O'Reilly Galleries; Roslyn Harbor, New York, Nassau County Museum of Art, Courbet: Later Paintings, January 6-May 29, 1998, no. 12
New York, Salander-O'Reilly Galleries, Gustave Courbet, October 28-November 29, 2003
Los Angeles, The J. Paul Getty Museum; Houston, The Museum of Fine Arts; Baltimore, The Walters Art Museum, Courbet and the Modern Landscape, February 21, 2006-January 7, 2007, no. 43 (Baltimore only)
Literature
Eugène Chéron, Album photographique de l'exposition Courbet, École Nationale des Beaux- Arts, Paris, 1882
Georges Riat, Gustave Courbet, peintre, Paris, 1906, p. 268
Robert Fernier, La vie et l'œuvre de Gustave Courbet, Lausanne and Paris, 1978, vol. II, p. 78, no. 681, illustrated p. 79
Peter-Klaus Schuster, et al., eds., Courbet und Deutschland, exh. cat., Hamburg Kunsthalle; Städtische Galerie im Städelschen Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt, October 19, 1978-March 18, 1979, p. 151, illustrated pl. 474/13
Pierre Courthion, L'opera completa di Courbet, Milan, 1985, p. 111, no. 654, illustrated p. 110 (as L'Onda Durante la Tempesta)
Catalogue note
Gustave Courbet, the great Realist painter from the valley of France’s Jura mountains, spent the summer of 1869 by the sea. From the coastal village of Étretat, he wrote to novelist Victor Hugo of his obsession with the violent force of the waves crashing off the shores of Normandy. “The sea! The sea!” he wrote, “… in her fury which growls, she reminds me of the caged monster who can devour me.” This painting, one of many representations of the wave motif created between Autumn 1869 and Spring 1870, demonstrates Courbet’s mature realist technique, seizing the material structure of the natural world and conferring a visceral closeness to its subjects. Though commonly celebrated for his radically avant-garde, monumental images of anonymous labor and humble village life from the 1840s and 1850s, this later workdemonstrates the endurance of Courbet’s remarkable artistic innovations and realist ambitions, as well as his profound contributions to the development of modern painting.
Having been long fascinated with landscape painting, and especially so in the latter years of his career, Courbet ambitiously undertook the challenge of creating what he termed “sea landscapes” (paysages de mer) after an introduction to the genre by the painter Eugène Boudin in the mid-1860s. However, unlike Boudin’s picturesque artifices of bourgeois seaside folly, Courbet developed his own interpretation of the subject in keeping with his determination to create a “living art” that truthfully represented his experience of the world around him. In so doing, he laid paint across the canvas with a palette knife, the tool normally reserved for mixing pigments on the palette, so as to empathically evoke the facticity of the observed, material world. In the wave’s darkest green depth, its vigorous white froth, and the thick crags of the picture’s rocky foreground, we see his distinctive painterly materiality evoking the very substance of aquatic and mineral textures. As Paul Cézanne would later recall, Courbet painted “the way a plasterer slaps on stucco. A real color grinder. He built like a Roman mason…he was a real painter.” Here, the roughly textured surface in the painting’s compressed foreground conveys the palpable substance of the rugged shore at Étretat, imparting the sense that we might reach out and touch it directly. As Cézanne described it, The Wave “hits you right in the chest, and you must retreat. The whole room feels the spray.”
This painting’s subject may recall sublime images of storied shipwrecks in the Romantic tradition of J.M.W. Turner or coastal leisure scenes by a young Claude Monet. Courbet, however, rejects classical tropes of visual seduction by withholding any human presence or narrative incident. Instead, he uses tonal gradation and variegated texture to draw the viewer’s eye outwards off the rocks, only to be pushed back out by the force of the great uncoiling wave that occupies the entire width of the canvas. Such pictorial construction serves to emphasize the drama within the scene, thereby conveying the effects of unbridled nature in nearly abstract form. Indeed, in his attempt to represent the effect of crashing waves with all the force of lived experience, Courbet created a touchstone for later modernist painters from the Impressionists and Cézanne, to Picasso and the Abstract Expressionists. It was his bravura in paint handling, captivating pictorial rhythm, and anti-narrative content that caused the critic Clement Greenberg, writing in 1949, to look back to Courbet, and The Wave in particular, as a point of origin for the most ambitious modern painting of the twentieth century.