View of the Parc de Crete over Clarens 1874

Gustave Courbet made this landscape with oil on canvas, a scene blanketed in snow. Here, the material qualities of paint become especially vivid. Courbet wasn't just representing a landscape, he was also building one, layer by layer. You can see the palpable texture of the paint, applied with bravura. The way the snow is rendered, thick and creamy, almost sculptural. He made these works in series, selling them to tourists. The works show his radical politics by showing the landscape without idealization. There's an honesty to the scene, a kind of unvarnished truth, that aligned with his social realism. By attending to the materiality of paint and to the conditions of its making and consumption, we move beyond traditional art-historical focus on subject matter, and towards a richer understanding of Courbet's revolutionary project.