Courbet - The Sea (1865)

The Granite Wave

While a dramatic painting, “The Sea” isn’t exactly advertising your next beach vacation.

In 1865, while the French bourgeoisie used new rail lines to flock to Trouville for the salt air, Courbet was busy insulting the Atlantic. He was done with the polished nudes and mythological fluff required by the Paris Salons. He wanted the truth about reality, and he found it in a three-month frenzy where Courbet produced thirty-five sea landscapes that felt less like paintings and more like physical assaults.

Courbet opted not to use a brush to capture the water. Instead he wielded a palette knife like a trowel. He slapped oil onto the canvas as if he were laying bricks or spreading mortar on a basement wall. This was not the shimmering, fleeting light of the Impressionists who would follow him. This was the terrifying, physical mass of the ocean. He treated the sea like a slab of granite.

Photography was already breathing down the neck of every painter in Europe by 1865. It could capture a moment, but it couldn’t convey a sense of weight. Courbet’s "The Sea" was his answer to the silver plate where Gustave proved that paint could convey something a camera never could. He gave the world a wall of salt water and told the critics to deal with it. It was a rejection of the old academic gods in favor of the indifferent, crashing reality of the oppressive immensity of the black Atlantic coast.

References

• Clark, T.J. Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution. University of California Press, 1999.
• Faunce, Sarah, and Linda Nochlin. Courbet Reconsidered. Brooklyn Museum, 1988.
• Rubin, James H. Courbet. Phaidon Press, 1997.
• Toussaint, Hélène. Gustave Courbet, 1819-1877. Arts Council of Great Britain, 1978.