Winter Landscape
1850 - 1877
Gustave Courbet captures the biting chill of a French winter in this stark, snowy forest scene. The gnarled, leafless trees stretch their dark branches like skeletal fingers against a pale, overcast sky, while the ground is blanketed in thick, textured snow. As a pioneer of the Realism movement, Courbet rejected idealized landscapes, choosing instead to paint the rugged, unvarnished truth of nature he saw in his hometown of Ornans. He often applied paint with a palette knife rather than a brush, giving the snow and tree bark a rough, tactile quality that makes you almost feel the freezing wind.
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