Gorge in a Forest (The Black Well)

"Gorge in a Forest" belongs to Gustave Courbet's geological landscapes from the 1850s and 1860s. In this painting, Courbet applied, sculpted, and scraped his paint with a palette knife, instead of using a brush. In so doing, he created a rough surface that matches his rocky-landscape subject matter.
Courbet's mid-nineteenth-century landscapes resembled the then-new photographic medium in their choice of perspective and aggressive cropping. Throughout this body of work, Courbet insisted on painting only what was before him--again in a manner comparable to photography--breaking from centuries of historical and religious content.
In these respects, and because of his understanding that "painting is in itself a reality--a two-dimensional world of stretched canvas defined by the nature and consistency of the paint," in the words of art historian H. H. Arnason, many consider Courbet to be one of the first modern painters.