Panoramic View of the Alps, Les Dents du Midi (1877): Art, History and Details

Panoramic View of the Alps, Les Dents du Midi (1877) 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:

Courbet was still working on this large landscape, intended for the Paris Universal Exposition of 1879, when he died in December 1877. He painted it during his exile in Switzerland, where he had fled after being condemned for subversive activities in the Paris Commune of 1871. The view looks south over Lake Geneva toward the mountains called Les Dents du Midi. While some areas are heavily worked with a palette knife, the lower right remains unfinished.

Object facts

• Title: Panoramic View of the Alps, Les Dents du Midi
• Date: 1877
• Creator attribution: Gustave Courbet (French, 1819–1877)
• Culture: France, 19th century
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on fabric
• Dimensions: Framed: 172 x 230 x 8.5 cm (67 11/16 x 90 9/16 x 3 3/8 in.); Unframed: 151.2 x 210.2 cm (59 1/2 x 82 3/4 in.)
• Collection: Mod Euro - Painting 1800-1960
• Department: Modern European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1964.420

A detail from the museum

This late, unfinished painting reveals some of Courbet's techniques. At the top of the mountains you can see how different brushstrokes and thickly applied paint were used to differentiate the texture of the clouds from the snow.

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund and various donors by exchange

Further reading listed by the museum

• Riat, Georges, and Paul Vitry. Gustave Courbet, peintre. Paris, France: H. Floury, 1906.
• Léger, Charles. Courbet et son temps; lettres et documents inédits. Paris, France: Éditions universelles, 1948.
• "Year in Review for 1964." The Bulletin of The Cleveland Museum of Art LI, no. 12 (December, 1964): 236-267.

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.