Gustave Courbet, View of Lac Léman

Turbulent grey clouds roll across the sky. The lake beneath it is calm, but a storm threatens. It’s evening, and a tiny sailing boat in the distance is little more than a smudge on the horizon against the vivid orange and gold of the dying sun. Soft red reflections streak the surface of the water. Far to the right, at the tip of the promontory, a sail catches the sun’s colours as a boat slips homewards for shelter. Further along towards the mainland a tall spire gleams white against the deep grey shadows of the hills.

The water ripples in towards the shore, lapping around the pale rocks on the strip of sand to the right. Close to us, bigger, darker rocks topped with green seaweed face the waves that will come if the wind rises. A little way out a woman stoops to collect freshwater shellfish, her enormous basket hooked over her back. Her red coat echoes the red of Courbet’s firm, bold signature in the bottom right corner of the painting.

On 23 July 1873 Courbet fled France for Switzerland. As President of the Arts Commission during the short-lived Commune that followed the 1871 revolution, he was held responsible for the cost of replacing the Vendôme Column, which had been destroyed. He settled at La-Tour-de Peilz on the shores of Lac Léman (Lake Geneva), where he bought an old inn in the town, Bon-Port, and received his permit of residence. He had managed to bring many of his pictures with him and held a successful exhibition in his new home.

Courbet painted several views of the lake from the terrace of Bon-Port, many at sunset. They were even more dramatic than this one, but the sky was again the main subject of the paintings. Some years earlier, from 1859 to 1869, he had visited the coast of Normandy where he produced a series of seascapes that were also focused on the sky and full of light. He seems to have painted the Lac Léman pictures with the rolling skies and jagged, weed-strewn rocks of Normandy still fresh in his in mind.

During his exile, the French state seized Courbet’s property and put his friends and family under surveillance. The country was politically unstable and the artist refused to return to Paris until a general amnesty had been declared. It did not happen. He had been welcomed in Switzerland, but even so, he fell into decline and painted less and less well. He died on 31 December 1877 at Bon-Port, a few days after the contents of his Paris studio had been sold at a public auction in his absence. The man who had taken Paris by storm – of whom it was written, ‘It was as if a whirlwind had roared through the gallery rattling the windows and shattering the glass’ – died almost penniless and in exile.