Low Tide at Trouville

One of a number of seascapes Courbet painted at the fashionable resort of Trouville on the Normandy coast. Courbet, born and brought up in inland France, did not see the sea until he was 22, when he wrote to his parents: “We have at last seen the horizonless sea; how strange it is for a valley dweller. You feel as if you are carried away; you want to take and see the whole world”. He was exhilarated as much by the autumn sky and its subtle, misty light as by the ocean. In response he evolved a new manner of painting in paler colours, producing here with his broad palette knife delicate colour effects in the salmon-pink-flecked sky.