 Thank you, Martha, for that incredibly generous introduction, and I also want to just take a brief moment to thank the Barnes Foundation and Alia Palumbo for making it possible for me to be here today, and to thank all of you for coming out on a beautiful Saturday morning to hear me talk about what are going to be these very dark, brooding landscapes. But I hope it will be worth it. One of the things that was difficult about putting together this presentation is that one as an author wants to sell the best bits of the book, but at the same time you don't want to give away all the secrets. And so in order to avoid being like a movie trailer that gives you the plot so that you therefore don't have to watch the movie, I have made the decision that I will give with a handful of exceptions images that are not in the book so that if you're excited about what you hear you'll be even more anxious to get to the bookstore and buy it and see what's in there. Oops, there we go. The other feature of this lecture, which you might notice now with this Barnes image is that any image that is highlighted in magenta is an image that is either at the Barnes, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, or in a local collection. So if you want to go see it in person, because for these particular types of works it really benefits to see them in person, you can find them in local collections. So I begin with the Breton spinner from 1867 in the Barnes collection, although not in the actual installation at the moment. To give you a sense of what Corbe was doing around 1867, this painting of a spinner sitting in a landscape with a dog to her left and some sheep in a meadow in front of her was shown at a private exhibition that Corbe held outside the 1867 World's Fair, and it was in this exhibition that Corbe showed that he wanted to posit himself as his own kind of institution or anti-institution to the state programs at the time. And he had actually already done that in 1855 in what was one of the first great gestures of modern art in its anti-institutional form by building another temporary exhibition outside the 1855 World's Fair, which itself was France's response to the 1851 Crystal Palace exhibition. And this was at a time when these national World's Fairs were really heating up across the world. Now if you had gone to this private pavilion, the Pavilion of Realism in 1855, one of the works that would have been literally in your face is the famous Artists Studio in which Corbe depicts himself flamboyantly painting a landscape with a nude contemporary model behind him, a child gazing innocently at what he is doing. And a cast of characters that included on his right many of his close friends and associates, all affiliated with the realist movement, and on the left types and figures and characters that he liked to identify with such as beggars, for instance. But what is interesting for us today besides the fact that this thing was very, very large and the figure is almost life-size, is the central group where you have a very complicated and historically important moment when Corbe both declares his love for nature but also shows that in doing so he's turning his back towards genres like the nude and academic figure painting. But of course at the same time he's showing that he's still very capable of doing it. So it's this very, very deliberately conflicted image. But that image of him not in front of a real landscape but in front of a painted landscape echoes what he liked to publicize about himself because he himself was not from Paris but from the French Conte which was one of the provinces. And in many ways he liked to advertise that when he came to show his works in the capital. So just to give you an example of what he would say about his relationship to landscape I wanted to show this quotation and read it right now in which he says, quote, to paint the country one must know it. I know my country, I paint it. These undergrowth there from home. This river, it's the Lou. That one, the Lison. These rocks there from Ornant and the Pouign Noir. Go see them and you will recognize my paintings. So he very much wanted his self identity to be wound up with his birthplace. And I'm showing on this map the region of eastern France where he was from which was right next to the Swiss border. In French history has an interesting development because it was so close to German speaking lands and the Swiss border it oftentimes would lean more east than west and often would find itself in conflict with its neighboring regions like Burgundy. And so when we speak about French national identity the French Conte both was and was not of France. And the people who lived there particularly those who were against the national government would often pride themselves on their independent streak. Now the landscape itself is a big limestone block that epochal erosion has created several valleys and riverways and sometimes these waterways go into the landscape through various grottoes and come out elsewhere. Sometimes as large sources of rivers but sometimes as less spectacular sites. Courbet himself grew up in the town of Ornant which was on the Lou River and I'm showing you on the left here his family house which is now the museum Courbet. And he would paint there until about 1864 and then after that point he actually moved to a studio outside of town where he could paint larger canvases more comfortably. And there he was very careful to get a plot of land that had both access to the river but also to the landscape behind the studio so that he could actually get on his donkey and go to the sites that he painted relatively easily. And even inside that studio he actually decorated his ceilings with landscapes and so I'm showing you in the larger image a recently discovered fresco within that studio and that studio was recently bought by the local government and restored so now if you go to Ornant you can actually see the studio that for a long time I believe was a car garage. Courbet painted landscapes throughout his career and already in the 1840s he is creating very typical romantic painting where you have viewers in the landscape gazing out at in this case the sea the Normandy coast as a sign of the subjective experience you have as you walk through the landscape as you travel through it. But as he developed into his more familiar realist vein like the work on the right which is in the met of the women of the village and these are actually his sisters he was very careful to put that very distinguished cliff landscape of the French Conte in the background as the setting for these figures which then when they were shown in Paris would definitely have stood out as being from that region. And that continues in the most famous canvases like the Braille d'Ornant where the background above the figures of the heads of the burial is once again one of those Francois cliffs and he even emphasizes the rockiness of the landscape by having the grave be right in the center of the painting in front of the viewer. Now Courbet was not unique in painting landscape in the 19th century but actually by then it was a very time-honored tradition and here I'm showing you two lesser known images of Courbet actually out in the landscape painting in the open air. He would often paint sketches and then bring them back to his studio to finish. The one on the left is a painting by Corot in fact that they painted he painted side by side with Courbet and so Courbet is in the foreground of that image in the center painting on an umbrella and I show you the detail of that in the bottom. And then the work on the right is by another artist on the Normandy coast where Courbet is painting by the sea. So by this time the image of the landscape painter as the person who rejects drawing after the nude and academic procedures in the studio was already a cliché. Caricaturist like Honoré Domier drew this particularly humorous image of Les Paisages, landscape painters, the Première Coppée la nature, the first copies nature, the second Coppée le premier, the second copies the first. And Courbet of course leaned into this idea that the rebellious artist must return to nature in order to dispose of all convention when he painted this in a way portrait of himself and his patron Alfred Gruyas in which he has his easel and umbrella on his backpack out in the open sun in Montpellier. And then of course he also hired photographers to capture his image out in the landscape and this large photographic image is actually in front of that studio on the outskirts or not. So what kind of landscape did Courbet paint? Well forest for one and the left is often identified as the forest of Barbizon outside of Paris although to my knowledge that has never actually been conclusively proven. And then he also went on trips when he was not in Paris often during the summers and the work on the right which is an immense canvas in the Musée d'Orsay is actually in Germany in the in the Black Forest where he painted these stags in kind of epic confrontation. But he also traveled to other parts of France and this is from the region around Bordeaux, the Saint-Tonge and this was along one of the rivers in that part of France. And you can see that sometimes these landscapes seem to have been painted in preparation to add figures at least that's how this one always reads to me. And so that vast green expanse at the bottom right seems ready made for an animal or some sort of figure for local character. And I mentioned that because if you look at the Barnes painting and think about it in terms of what he was doing in some of these Saint-Tonge pictures you can detect this idea of inserting a particular character with a certain local flair to inhabit the landscape. So the work on the left is a Saint-Tonge landscape and the work on the right is the Barnes painting, which presumably is somewhere in Brittany. The figure of the rider on the donkey is something that Courbet actually would transpose into other landscapes. So one and a half years later when he's back in the French Conte painting he would just take the same type of figure and put it on a bridge. So the work on the upper right, which is now in the Yale Art Gallery, is a Francois landscape with this one of these gushing sources, but he simply just juxtapose or transfer it over the figure on the donkey. So sometimes these landscapes aren't exactly about one particular site but sometimes he could mix motifs. And sometimes if he didn't have a particular figure he would go back to his previous works, like this dog from an early self-portrait added in into the Barnes painting. Now it wasn't just inland scenes when he went to the coast, the southern coast in the case on the left in Montpellier, and in the northern coast near Truville on the right, he would paint some of the seemingly emptiest seascapes up until that point in art history. But from another point of view there are also some of the fullest because the way that they're painted is so sensuous and organic that you almost feel the waves and the moisture-laden air as a kind of heaviness there on the canvas. And that is especially true in a later series of paintings of waves from 1869 when he was in Eftwater. The image on the right is very large and in Paris and it's probably well known but even by the 19th century it was a postcard image. But the work on the left, which is in Philadelphia, shows when clouds and waves become almost mirror images of each other. So with this general trajectory in mind, the various travels that he took and the situation of landscape painting in the 19th century, I want to turn now to the question of technique, which is one of the other primary ways we have come to recognize Courbet as a great inventor in painting. And the tool for which he is most famous is the palette knife. And the palette knife, unlike the brush, is a tool that was used to mix paints on the palette and then either apply them in large swaths to let's say the background of a painting or in selected details. And what's interesting about Courbet in the landscapes is that he often used the palette knife or brushes that were used to look like they were making palette knife marks throughout the entire painting, which gave them this physical presence that other paintings of the time did not have. And people often interpreted this as being a kind of crude workman, worker's painting and would depict Courbet as in the caricature on the left as someone who painted with a trowel, like a bricklayer. At other times, the thickness of the painting was related more to food stuff and so the knife wasn't a trowel but a pastry chef's knife loaded with cream. And so the work on the right is a caricature of one of the waves as a painting of cream. And this went hand in hand with some of his other famous images in which he is often depicted as a very bloated gluttonous person who'd like to drink beer and eat and laugh and have a good time but also someone who was interested in manual labor and the working class. So those images of excess but also of class identity are both folded into his image of an artist who uses the palette knife. To put this into context, I think it helps to look at what the other major schools of landscape painting were at the time and how they treated texture and technique because I think it puts the palette knife use into greater relief. So probably the most dominant school at the time was that of historical landscape painting which was called as such because it harkened back to the Italian countryside when French painters for centuries would go to hone their trade and then come back to Paris and show at the salon. And that type of painting usually imitated 17th century French and Italian painters who liked panoramic views with a lot of blues and greens and typically in very idyllic scenarios or those based on mythological subjects. Now at times, especially in the work of Corot, Camille Corot, the work could have a kind of sketchiness and freedom of execution that sometimes has parallels with Corot-based painting. In fact, Corot and Corbe painted side by side in 1862 and so they would have been quite familiar with each other's working technique. But inevitably when those works were shown at the salon, they were much more finished and a lot of the roughness or gestural expression was lost. Such was not the case in many of the painters of the English school like John Constable. The work in Philadelphia is one of the what are called six-footers which are very, very large paintings at the scale of painting for the public exhibition but done in the style and execution of a rougher sketch. And Constable actually painted them at the same time and unlike other painters was not magnifying a smaller sketch to a larger painting. And so there's a collapse between study and finished work that begins to occur in his works. But perhaps the most immediate model for Corbe's landscape painting was the Barbizon school so called because many of these artists like Jean-François Mille and Théodore Rousseau spent part if not all of their lives in the village of Barbizon in the Fontaine-Lôte Forest. So in a way this was a kind of compromise position. It was a landscape outside of Paris but not so far that you had to take a train or a day's carriage ride to get there. It was just outside the city. And it is really there that many of the more inventive landscape techniques were happening. So in the Mille in Philadelphia on the right you have this quite amazing electrification of the forest using fire light to animate the landscape. And so rather than the trees and the ground being the most solid parts it's actually the light of this fire that is this most solid part of the painting. And it's really in Théodore Rousseau that you have the craziest and wildest exploration of technique. So in this view of Mont Blanc in Switzerland you have everything from a very opaque treatment of the snow to a very washy representation of the foreground. So the snow is on the right, on Mont Blanc and the thinness where you can even see some of the drawing of the preliminary stages is in the detail on the left. But despite all those moments of experimentation in the landscapes of Courbet's immediate predecessors there is really nothing like the palette knife painting that he practices. And that's because instead of going for the sweeping gesture or the kind of vocation of romantic wildness his paintings when he uses the palette knife tend to be very impacted and dense and almost still in a way. And because he uses the knife there are no traces of brush hairs that signal the artist's hand movements but instead you have this very patch-like application of paint that is built up in layers. But surprisingly given the caricatures those layers aren't incredibly thick and then bulging off the canvas. In fact there tend to be no more than three yet they give the illusion of a surface relief that one had never seen before. And so this effect actually interested me quite a great deal when I was writing the book because I was trying to figure out why after all these years of being taught that Courbet painted like a brick layer that actually his landscapes were not that thick yet appeared to be so. And as I began to look at more of his paintings I did what I think many of us do which is try to get closer to the canvas to figure out how he made it. And what's interesting about Courbet's landscapes is that as you get closer to them and expect the illusion to collapse into pure paint that actually doesn't happen right away. As you move closer you see more paint layers but because the landscape itself is very humidified and organic and paint-like you see all those paint strokes as just another layer of the landscape that is being revealed to you as you move closer into that dark core of the cave. And this happens I would argue even as you get very very close. Yes it's paint but it also appears like it could be the wet surface of a rock. Now eventually of course you do see it as paint but compared to all other painters before him that moment of the collapse of the illusion takes very very long time which is why they have such a magnetic attraction to the viewer. The viewer wants to know more and more and yet is not given the answer and I think Courbet was actually going for that effect in these landscapes. And in particular in the paintings of Grotto's that he does at a very very specific point in his career which is in 1864. And it is such an unusual motif for the time yet so insistent in his work that as I began to research there had to be a reason for this because Courbet did not have to paint those Grotto's he could have painted the buildings around them or down river from them and these are both images from the 19th century that show the entire complex of mills and foundries that were around these water sources which were a source of power until you had more industrial forms of power. But he also didn't paint at this time with the same insistence all the views from the plateaus above those river valleys which he easily could have and did earlier in his career. And he didn't even paint the views that were down in the river that much either. But what he did paint beside those Grotto's were these shaded streams and covered river beds that look as if no one had set foot in them before as if you were in some sort of primordial universe that you just discovered. And unlike some of those Grotto paintings these were not tourist sites. This site called the Pouignoir or the Blackwell was the one mentioned in that quote I read earlier. And this was one of those sites that Courbet would visit on his donkey from his studio and was really unique to him and yet he painted it over and over again in many different formats and from many different points of view. And what is striking about them and I'm showing you a particularly beautiful one in Baltimore is that they have an almost proto-Sezanian display of the manufacture of paint from basic touches to build the illusion of form. In this particular image I think the green patch of light in the center is probably the most striking aspect because even though it's in the background because it's so bright it tends to leap forward which is something you often see in brushstrokes in Cezanne where something seems to be part of the background but actually comes forward because it's so large and because of the way it's colored. And when you have a landscape organized in this way with no point of access or easy egress and when you have no sky to provide an outlet for vision you are kind of stuck there and the only thing you have to look at really are the forms emerging from the darkness and that kind of temporality of this slow illumination is very different from the kind of viewing time when your eye goes from point A to point B in a landscape and follows a trail. Here the trail if there is one is frozen is stopped at the river. This is the photograph of the interior of the studio that I had showed earlier back in the 19th century in fact the very same year that he's painting these grottoes and streams and on the back wall, the very large one slightly to the left was one of these Puy Noir that he painted in 1864 and so you can see that every day that Courbet was working he had these big landscapes all around him and so it makes sense that he would be particularly focused on this type of image. The one thing I forgot to mention is that in the previous decade in the 1850s and even in the early 1860s Courbet traveled pretty much every summer but in 1864 he stayed in the Franche Conte for about a year and a half without really moving for the first time in years so he really had the time and the interest in really depicting in a new way his local landscape. Now I want to move in this part of the talk to two particular landscapes that he paints at this time that reflect some of his interest in this moment of 1864 where he's looking at the landscapes of his region in a new way. That is he's engaging with the research and activities of his friends who weren't necessarily painters and who weren't necessarily even writing about or studying landscape a group of writers, scientists all of whom were in that region and sometimes in the very same town that Courbet was staying in. The work on the left is a waterfall called the Gour de Conte which means a gulf of the shells like a Conte shell and that's because the river that feeds this waterfall was lined with which shell shapes and it had a particular resonance for Courbet at the time which has really been lost now but which in the course of my research was very interesting to uncover. One of the things I want to mention before going into this story however is just to give you a little feel for what it's like to go to these landscapes. The Gour de Conte like the Puy Noir is a massive site in the French Conte. In fact if you try to find it there's a sign but no parking lot so you have to park on the side of the street and then walk about a quarter of a mile with no indication about where you're going and you more or less stumble across it and from where I was coming I was coming from where the bridge is on the upper part of the canvas but to get down there there's no path or staircase. You actually have to grip onto this rope that has been attached to tree trunks and kind of amble your way down and I actually fell coming down that but luckily it had snowed and there were a lot of leaves so that broke my fall because in the age before cell phones if I had broken my back I would have been stuck in the middle of nowhere all in pursuit of Corbe research which it sounds very committed to the cause but I must say it could have turned out much differently. Now like many of the other landscapes when you try to actually photograph the landscape in person you realize that Corbe pushed the landscape much closer to the viewer than it actually exists in reality so I was trying to stand where the top edge of the rocks would be more or less where the painting is which I tried to do on the right and you see that the waterfall is way back in the background so Corbe has actually pushed it up because he wants the water and the rock face to be literally in your face. When you try to approximate the size of the waterfall for instance you actually have to get very, very close to it and so the image on the right was my attempt to get to the position where I feel that it's just as close as it is in the painting and it is way closer than from the far view. You can also add to that that in order to stand where Corbe situated the viewer you actually had to be in the middle of the river so the work on the left is facing the waterfall the image on the right is me turning around 360 degrees to show what was behind me and you see I'm smack in the middle of the river so Corbe in these paintings is putting you in situations that you don't experience really unless you kind of do these mental contortions but the effect is one of being smack in the middle of a landscape so he's being both true to nature but almost going beyond it by emphasizing its physical sensuality so why did he paint this waterfall at all? Well, in his group of friends around that time many of them were interested in what was called the Battle of Elysia now those of you who know a little bit about French history might recognize that name because Elysia is the battle where Julius Caesar defeated the Gallic general Versenjectorix and essentially established France as an extension of the Roman Empire so historically that was the battle where France became part of the Latinate sphere of orbit of classical antiquity rather than the Celtic one and so that was around 52 BC it's one of those founding myths along with Joan of Arc that French people in the 19th century used as a way of establishing the origins of their national identity so it was really really important to know where that battle happened the location of Elysia was still hotly debated well into the 19th century and one of the candidates was a town not too far from Corbe's hometown of Ornon less than a day's travel and that town was called Elysia the other candidate was in Burgundy and was called Elysia now in order to determine the identity these towns and regions actually hired scholars military planners and what was becoming the field of archaeology sending archaeologists to mine the landscapes to find weapons the traces of paths the names of towns that matched Caesar's writings in the Gallic Wars so it became this incredible intellectual enterprise and the emperor himself, Napoleon III was writing a biography of Julius Caesar at the time of course really wanted to know where it actually happened so he could talk about it in his book in this map which is a 19th century map the town of Ales is circled and that wasn't me putting those circles in there that was actually from a magazine called the military spectator and that was where they hypothesized that the siege of Elysia took place and those were Caesar's lines that he used to encircle the Gallic camp and it was in one of those rings that the waterfall was located and in Caesar's Gallic Wars he talks about filling one of the ditches that they dug with water from one of the local waterfalls and so Courbet's friends who brought him to the Gourde Conche explained to him that actually the Gourde Conche was one of the waterfalls used to fill the trenches so it actually had a historical importance even though when you look at the painting it doesn't seem like it but the idea was that something seemingly as insignificant or minor as a certain part of the landscape if you began to look at it in its full historical context would reveal this hidden history that was not available by simply reading books or looking at maps you had to actually be in the landscape to compare it to the text and to do excavations in the field to mine or unearth this history and that the town of Salin which is at the bottom left will come up a little bit later and the source of the lizon which is very very close was also one of these caverns and grottoes that Courbet painted now this idea that digging up the past unearthing the landscape might reveal a counter history was particularly relevant in Courbet's time because Napoleon III eventually sided with Alize as the site of Alize and not Alize in the Franche Conte and he actually wanted to monumentalize that so he commissioned this very very large statue of Versailles Jecteriques and had it installed in Burgundy so Courbet being the good Francois that he was actually painted a painting called the Oak of Flage Flage was the plateau where his family had farmlands and actually when he exhibited this in 1867 at the same pavilion that he showed the Barnes painting he actually referred to it as the Oak of Versailles Jecteriques on facing the camp of Caesar so by naming the painting after the event involved with Alize he was implicitly declaring that he thought that Alize was Alize and therefore the official history put forward by the emperor was wrong now another aspect of this battle of Alize both the historical one but also the battle in the 19th century to determine its location also involved the study of language after all the texts were all in Latin and the place names were all in French or in the local dialect or patois and this is a cartoon from the period that it actually is now housed in the Museum of Archaeology in Saint-Germain-les and that museum actually was founded from the excavations that took place in Alize so it's very interesting that they kept that as a record and it's pasted on to this album and it says there's a cartoon on the right but the cartoon itself reads transcendental archaeology what are these men thinking about and it says some think Alize at their leisure the others think about Lees the others think about this woman named Lees so it's a little lost in the English translation but they're clearly playing on the idea that Alize and Alize are very close phonetically that by one vowel is the separation between the name of the two towns now why does that matter because in trying to prove one way or the other which town was Alize they had to go back to things like these inscriptions that they would find and this particular one has the name of Alize in classical language which I highlight in yellow where the vowel is spelled with an I and so there was a big debate which I don't have to go into here because it would take forever but to determine did the I become an E or did it stay as an I or did the I become an AI or did it become an I as in Alize so did it become Alize or did it become Alize and so in order to answer that question you had to study the history of the French language to figure out how vowels changed and that was actually one of the major goals of one of Courbet's friends a man named Max Bouchon who actually took it upon himself to write a whole series of texts and books that collected patois songs folk sayings and place names to try to establish a history of popular language that was centered on the French Conte and clearly all these investigations of language and in general interest in provincial culture fueled his research into the local language the main inspiration in fact was a book by one of Courbet's early critics named Jean Fleury in which he collected popular songs from the provinces of France and in fact in the French Conte section of that book Courbet did one of the illustrations which I'm showing on the right and in fact Jean Fleury must have interviewed Courbet because he mentions songs that Courbet's sisters used to sing and also illustrated well it referred to one of Max Bouchon's songs that he included in one of his short stories and actually even included the music in the book Bouchon himself was also interested in landscape not as a geologist or a painter but he actually owned one of Courbet's paintings of the source of the Lison River which is that source that was near Salin and Halez and these are two different versions we don't know which one he owned my guess is the smaller one but that's still to be proven and this shows clearly that Bouchon was in close dialogue with Courbet in fact Courbet was living in Salin where Bouchon was for three months at the end of 1864 now there actually was a geologist who was in this group a man named Jean Marcoux and he's actually depicted in this painting although you don't see him at first but he's that black figure right of center at the bottom hopefully you can all see them it's kind of easy to see his two legs the green at the bottom so he's there sketching the landscape and why is he doing that? well because that rock behind him overlooked Salin and was one of the objects of his researches here's the rock in a photograph like with many of the landscapes it's actually hard to get the point of view in the painting so in order to do this because I wanted you to see the strata climb up the cliff a little bit and do it from the top going down the strata were very important because as a geologist that's what Marcoux was interested in and Bouchon was fascinated by this and actually wrote a biography of Marcoux because he felt that this new science of geology or relatively new science of geology was revealing layers of earth history that let's say the biblical story of the earth's creation did not reveal if God made the earth then it couldn't be that old but the strata showed that there were layers of history that dated the origins of the earth way way way back into deep time and that was really a new kind of historical consciousness for the 19th century and here's Marcoux who actually was working in the US after 1848 and went on many of the expeditions to the American West that people like Timothy O'Sullivan went on but by the 1860s he wanted to raise his children in France so he moved back to his native town of Salin and there is when he reconnected with Bouchon and where Bouchon began to ask him about all these new discoveries and Marcoux besides doing this research into the local landscape he's actually probably most known because he's the one who coined the term Jurassic period for that particular moment in earth history from which comes of course Jurassic Park and all these other dinosaur affiliated terms so when you look back at these grottoes given this deep interest in origins on the part of geologists, linguists and writers you see that Corbe's depictions of the source are not simply replicating tourist images they are also committed to their own kind of visual archaeology where you peel back the layers of the landscape to discover its earlier states of creation and moments of creation that go back into the deep past that I think explains why he painted those paintings so that you keep feeling like you're going further and further into the landscape and visually peeling back layers of history because he wanted to create as art or in art the distended temporality of this long historical consciousness now the artist who understood that the most was Cézanne who is said to have said in front of this painting one of the great waves from 1869 that the wave strikes you in the face and I'm quoting him here and you feel like it's coming at you from the depth of ages so Cézanne more than anyone else understood both the physical presence and force of Corbe's painting but also this sense that the painting is creating a different kind of temporal experience one that is more akin to a geological excavation or a historical investigation in other words it's not about the superficial image that nature or the landscape gives you but the process that it requires you as the viewer to undergo to uncover layers of history and since I don't want to leave you with such a foreboding and overwhelming image I will just leave you with this much brighter Truville painting because the idea that nature or landscape or painting for that matter is a density that needs to be unpacked and unmind in order for the viewer to experience its full force well that's something that happens in a much more in a calmer and more muted fashion in the seascapes where matter is thrust upon you but also at the same time in a very expanded and infinite sense so the interesting thing about these seascapes even 65 onward is that they give you both a feeling of deep time but also immediacy of focusing on a particular area of water but also of the whole of looking at the ground beneath your feet but also the clouds in the far distance so it gives you this kind of almost universal sense of bathing and matter that is the next evolution in what Corbe is doing in landscape painting but in order to do that I have to read the book which also concludes I must say with Cezanne so there's much more to read but I thank you for being patient and listening to just these little hors d'oeuvres and I will conclude there sure so that people at home can hear so I'll start right here this is meant to be thrown so I'm going to talk about that Hi In the 1850s, 1860s there was an explosion of French landscape photography and Corbe would have been working in the Barbizon right next to photographers that were working was there a particular influence or how did he relate to photography? How did it... No, no, that's a great question in fact it is often argued that many of those wave paintings have almost photographic stillness to them in that the way they seem to freeze motion the 20th century German critic Walter Benjamin actually said that they prefigured in their snapshot sensibility later photographic techniques there's a couple ways to look at it that is the relationship between painting and photography in Corbe as you mentioned there was indeed a real explosion of landscape photography around mid-century many in fact of those early photographers were painters themselves and there was no escaping that it was in a way the translation of landscape sketching and paint, kind of Sunday painting into a new technological medium Corbe himself had a I think a much more utilitarian approach to photography in that he liked to use it to record his paintings and he liked to, if he didn't have a model available receive photographs, let's say portraits that he could then copy and put into his paintings but if you look at the photographic views of the sites he painted first of all they're much later but also they don't have the same framing and they certainly don't have the same materiality which is the big, big difference so I would say that although in Barbizon painting and photography you do have sometimes in the tonal variation something comparable in painting and photography I think with Corbe the use of the palette knife and the way of layering the paint is the main concern and so in a way I think photography is not a model for him in the landscapes that I was just talking about yeah, yeah, yeah I mean I think that if he let's say became a slave to the model or even just used it you wouldn't have all these features like changing the landscape so that it feels closer or having certain parts of it be very tactile they would have all seemed very distant and in fact there's a photographer named Gustave Le Gré who also did a lot of waves and his waves are always perfectly in the distance they're never in your face so I think that in a way they were their antithesis there's a question back here that I'll get you up here also people at home I've got the chat here so please type your questions into the chat and I will read them Mina thank you so much for a fantastic lecture and a fantastic approach to Couvet I was wondering because I've been working on Cézanne or I have worked on Cézanne and Cézanne's own interest in geological and petrological landscapes of his own country of his own region, Provence and I had put a kind of ethnic, nationalistic and regionalist twist to that and I noticed that perhaps with people like Marcou you also add something like that to Couvet's work and here is the gist of my question I noticed also that he paints in Normandy one of the hub of geological and paleontological research in the 19th century and that he records the very picturesque is it the Porte d'Aval or the Porte d'Amont or his Confucius a standard image of touristic postcards to begin with but also for those who were interested in geology a major document of the passage of time, or deep time if you want it was limestone it was manifestly stratigraphic and then it also was full of fossils and about the same time Monet is painting this it actually marks all the layers the stratigraphic layers and so I was wondering here that if Couvet had that interest developed already when he visited Normandy and just bypassed the geological detail for Normandy but stressed it when he was in his own region for reasons of local regionalist loyalty sorry I'm just pulling up the here I can see the layers are you familiar with Monet stratigraphic rock that's what's on my mind I think it dates from 1866 or 1868 for the Monet so first of all I must say I want to thank Nina for being one of the pioneers in this analysis of 19th century painting and geology her book on Cezanne is wonderful if you want to read even more from Courbet and yes I think the contrast you're pointing out between when Courbet painted in the Franche Conte and when he painted in Normandy is very pertinent because I agree with what you said that when he's in the orbit of Marquis the interest really is in the specificness of the local landscape and especially the geological aspect in the book I go into which particular geologist which is Alexandre Brognard that Marquis is actually paying homage to here because he actually writes about this rock with explicit reference to Brognard who was one of the pioneers of stratigraphy in 19th century French science but when he goes to Normandy Courbet was one of these people who was very, very open to whatever happened to be in the air around him and in addition to being a center of geological investigation it was also the kind of explosion of modern tourism because Normandy was now one hour away from Paris by train with the new train lines and when you read his letters that when he's in Normandy he talks as much if not more about the social life, the casinos and the demimonde and the Parisians who are there at the shore than he really does about geology that's it and when he goes to Etreta he actually shows the Etreta, the Porte d'Aval at the Salon of 1870 and he started with one of the wave paintings so not this particular wave painting but actually an even bigger one and I think that is a summary of his two approaches to landscape painting in the late 1860s so around 1869, 1870 you have the tourist image and you have the threatening visceral wave and those are the two poles of his landscape painting which is interesting precisely because he can do both at the same time and in many ways that's like his persona in general he had his social, heavily invested in the art scene side and then he had this almost kind of phenomenological, intensely personal and almost somatic experience of the landscape side and sometimes they come together and I think with the Etreta painting they are a part but of course Monet, as you correctly point out clearly tried to fuse them together which is why that painting is particularly interesting Thank you My question is really about these subjects which are so tumultuous certainly the waves and the waterfalls they're not restful images are they in some way metaphors for something in his personal background or even politically that he's referencing that we could draw from? Do you mean the waterfalls? The one that you just showed with all the rocks coming up and it feels very much like things are in turmoil so I'm just wondering if there's any kind of anything we can read into that I would stick with what I was saying earlier in that the political reference has to do with where it was located and how it was painted actually if you look at romantic images of similar types of motifs earlier in the century they actually tend to be even more agitated where the romantic sublime takes over and the waves and usually lightning and some sort of storm that is even more agitated so actually historically speaking they actually are relatively calm might not be the right word but kind of brooding and they kind of sneak up on you rather than kind of being a flash of lightning at least that's how I experience them and so yes in the case of the waterfall I think it has to do specifically with that intellectual milieu he's around the wave has been interpreted sometimes as a kind of commentary on the political situation at the time in the sense that this was right before the commune around the time of the Franco-Prussian war and that there was a kind of general malaise or illet easiness in the air I have a different interpretation but it has been read that way Paul I have about a million questions for you but I'm just going to ask one would you mind pulling up one of the grotto maybe the one where you zoomed in on the paint of the rocks yeah that's great the last one thank you so much for this talk it was fascinating and the history of the debate over the origins of Elysia was so interesting I my questions about these and I loved your discussion of what happens when you get closer in and how it doesn't just sort of dissolve into pure paint but there's this persistence of the kind of rock right I think my question then is about the darkness at the center and the role of that in these works because it's really I don't know it's sort of hard to look at I found myself I mean I love these paintings but it really has such a psychological effect and I think and maybe it's not this I think it's different when you're looking at a grotto like this in person but when it's in the center of a painting and you expect to be able to see what painting is about seeing right and at the very center there is this whole area that you just can't see so my question for you is about what is the role of this sort of absence at the part of these paintings no that's a great question because I agree they're very unsettling these images on the screen don't do them justice they are mostly over a meter wide or tall and I want to emphasize I do this in the book but I didn't do so much here that it is incredibly rare in the history of European painting to have the center of the painting be a black hole if you look at most paintings there's usually something in the center or at least something to fill the space and so to ask the viewer to look at nothing and yet have it be almost eating you up surrounding you is a very uncomfortable experience but I think that's the point because it's the only way that you're going to get the viewer to kind of get past the instinctual distance that you put between yourself and an image to kind of get closer to the painting and I'm sure probably maybe not at the barns because you can actually get pretty close to the paintings here but if you go to some of the bigger museums the paintings are hung higher and the rooms are bigger so you tend not to get close to them but these paintings entice you in however creepy they may be and that's I think unique to Courbet and particularly to these grotto paintings. The other thing I want to say is that the ground here, that dark ground is not viewed when you're up close to it as you know some sort of you know non-treated surface that the paint sits on top of they're almost like a matrix of origination where because he uses a lot of translucent paint even kind of in the darker areas you still want to examine them because there's probably going to be more there if you just get closer and look at them so that's a very different conception of the ground than to the blank canvas it's not like in Cezanne where you have exposed ground and then paint there's actually an incredibly bodily experience of layers of substance as you get closer to them yeah so I think that's a really good point to point out how unusual that is thank you another question will be quick I just loved that you included photos of the actual locations we were sort of traveling to place with you and traveling you as you traveled you know after that viewpoint so I'd love if you could elaborate a bit on the importance of going to the places that were in the paintings and how that sort of helped you think through your arguments of time and place and you know landscape experiences time maybe different than us and how that's a link to the past and anything on that and thank you so much thanks it's it was actually really fun to bring out those photos again because you know once you go you have it in your memory and I don't reproduce them in the book but I think it helps to tell the story because in a way you're putting yourself in the painter's shoes and in this particular case of Courbet in his native region I think it is important because you realize one how much he changed what he saw but also how close everything was in a 19th century sense I mean I was there driving my rental car everywhere but if you imagine okay this was a carriage or a horse it was still pretty close by for the time and so these are sites that are close to each other but also he didn't paint the sites in between he didn't paint the plateaus he didn't paint so much the river towns and so you get a kind of sense of the selectivity and one of the reasons actually I don't talk about it in the book so much is that there is a certain way of doing scholarship on landscape painting where identifying the site is almost treated as the be all end all you explain the painting if you find the site it's kind of iconography but for landscape and I didn't want that to be the main thrust of my book and so I didn't put it in there it's a means to an end and it just happens to be very productive in Courbet's case but there's other artists you probably wouldn't learn so much about them if you saw the part of Fontainebleau Forest that everyone else painted because probably they painted it because everyone else painted like in that caricature rather than having any kind of deep almost scientific interest in it the way Courbet did at this time I think we should just read you a comment from the chat thank you for a fascinating talk I will see Courbet's work very differently now thank you so much thank you thank you