Landscape with a Mill near Ornans

Courbet painted this landscape with a mill near Ornans in the 1850s. He was about 35, the leading Realist painter in France, and he was painting the countryside around his hometown in the Jura valley of eastern France. These landscapes are among his most personal works, painted not for exhibition but for himself. A mill stands beside a stream in a wooded valley. The mill building is visible at the center of the painting, its stone walls and wooden water wheel partly hidden by trees. The stream runs across the foreground, its water rendered in dark greens and browns. Tall trees fill the left side of the composition, their trunks dark against the sky. The sky is grey, the light soft and even, the kind of light you see in a wooded valley on an overcast day. Courbet was born in Ornans in 1819, in the Jura valley near the Swiss border. He moved to Paris in 1839 and established himself as a painter of large-scale figurative works, but he returned to Ornans regularly throughout his life and painted the landscape around the town. His paintings of the Jura valley are the foundation of Realist landscape painting: he painted what he saw, without idealizing the scene or arranging it into a classical composition. The streams, the rocks, and the trees of the Ornans countryside became his subjects, and he painted them with a directness that was new in French art. Courbet's Realism was a deliberate challenge to the academic tradition. The academy valued historical and mythological landscapes, composed in the studio according to classical rules. Courbet painted real places, observed directly, and he used a thick, textured brushwork that emphasized the physical reality of paint on canvas. His landscapes influenced the next generation of painters, including the Impressionists, who took his practice of painting outdoors and made it the basis of their own work. Oil on canvas, roughly 73 by 92 centimeters, about 29 by 36 inches. Courbet painted with a rich, textured surface, building the trees and the rocks in thick layers of dark green and brown. The water in the stream is rendered in broad strokes of dark color, with the reflections indicated by lighter touches. The mill building is painted more precisely, with the stone walls and the water wheel described in detail. The horizontal format and dark palette make this print work well in a living room, study, or dining room with traditional furniture. The woodland subject suits a room with warm-toned walls and dark wood. A dark wood frame matches the painting's earthy palette. The 12x16 or 16x20 size gives the mill and the trees enough detail to appreciate up close. The painting is in the Rhode Island School of Design Museum in Providence. This is a public domain artwork. We print it on archival matte paper at sizes from 8x10 to 18x24 inches, framed or unframed. The image is printed at full resolution with no cropping.