Landscape with Large Trees (c. 1870): Art, History and Details

Landscape with Large Trees (c. 1870) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Gustave Courbet (French, 1819–1877).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

The relatively few drawings that Gustave Courbet produced include the group of landscapes to which this example belongs. Rather than referencing a specific place, it combines a wide range of source material—tourist destinations the artist visited in Switzerland, his home in the Franche-Comté region, and paintings by Claude Lorrain and other historical landscapists. Courbet began by applying a hazy middletone in charcoal before adding detail with a darker, sharpened stick. Although surely appealing to collectors of the time, such works also had ideological significance, presenting an untouched terrain that suggested independence and freedom.

Object facts

• Title: Landscape with Large Trees
• Date: c. 1870
• Creator attribution: Gustave Courbet (French, 1819–1877)
• Culture: France, 19th century
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: black chalk with stumping on brown wove paper
• Dimensions: Sheet: 38.1 x 52.4 cm (15 x 20 5/8 in.)
• Collection: DR - French
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 1976.18

A detail from the museum

The slightly blurred appearance of this drawing recalls a similar effect common in early landscape photography.

Collection credit

Dudley P. Allen Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Lee, Sherman E. "The Year in Review for 1976." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 64, no. 2 (1977): 39-78.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art/1978. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1978.
• Fernier, Robert. La Vie et l’œuvre de Gustave Courbet: Catalogue raisonné. Lausanne: Bibliothèque des Arts, 1978.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.