View of Lake Geneva

The viewer looks across a stretch of water from a rocky shoreline. At the left, on a promontory, is a cluster of buildings. Though the architecture and the terrain are in keeping with a site on Lake Geneva, the specific scene has not been identified.

The rather crude handling of the pigments has little in common with the work of Courbet. Robert Fernier, president of the Amis de Courbet, concluded in a letter to the museum of 1972, that this work might have been painted by the master's follower from Ticino, Chérubino Pata (1827-1899), who is known to have been responsible for a number of forgeries dating from Courbet's last years in Switzerland.