Courbet, Gustave (1819-1877)
Mer orageuse (Stormy sea)
s.d.
Oil on canvas, 80 x 100 cm
Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires
From an early age, Gustave Courbet was interested in painting outdoors. In addition to wooded nature and large groves, throughout his production he favoured the representation of water, in serene mirrors, flowing rivers and gentle or rough seas, motifs that found an interested clientele. His tours along the Normandy coast of France, on the edge of the English Channel, were frequent, with periodic visits to Le Havre, Honfleur, Trouville and Deauville, places that also appear in paintings by other artists of the Barbizon school who, like him, pursued sensitive observation of nature and reacted against the modernisation of large cities.
On several occasions, Courbet painted in Étretat, another coastal area of Normandy, characterised by its fishermen and sailors, although by the 1860s it had grown as a seaside resort for tourism. At that time, the place had a casino, manor houses, shops and small hotels frequented by a bourgeoisie with free time to rest or to cure their ailments during the summer period. Other artists also came to this place at different stages, Eugène Delacroix, Camille Corot, Eugène-Louis Boudin, Johann-Barthold Jongkind and Claude Monet, and writers such as Gustave Flaubert and Victor Hugo. Many of them were struck by the particularity of the landscape, an extensive coastline of vertical, abrupt and steep cliffs of white alabaster, with a particular profile: natural arches and caves eroded by water, inside which nest albatrosses, gulls and other marine species. The beaches are also characterized by their numerous pebbles, while on the cliffs there are blankets of vibrant grass, all characteristics that attracted these painters, in addition to the clarity of its air, and the wind, which lashes hard at certain times of the year, leaving the tides turbulent and in constant movement.
In the summer of 1869 Courbet spent some time here, as a guest in a house that stood on one of the cliffs. In one of the rooms overlooking the sea, the writer Guy de Maupassant saw him in front of the windows, depicting the enormous waves that crashed against the cliff. This is a group of paintings whose protagonist is the sea after the storms, in contrast to the serene beaches he had painted four years earlier in the Trouville area. In general, they are small-format pieces (although he later reworked some of them in larger sizes in his studio in Paris), made with a spatula and abundant oils, and from a very close distance, as if he were immersed in the water, which occupied a large part of the canvas, with the waves as the main motif. He avoided depicting figures or objects, and only in a few pieces can boats or ships be seen in the distance, the only trace of human presence in the place. Two works linked to these beaches, The Stormy Sea (or The Wave) and The Cliff of Étretat, were successfully exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1870.
Stormy Sea, from the MNBA, belongs to the group of paintings he made in this place, as does Seascape (made in 1870), also from the museum’s collection. In Stormy Sea, Courbet made a small-format work with the sea in the foreground, far from the conventions of historical landscape, with the movement of the water, the reverberation of light on the foam of the waves and the force of the wind, through the use of loose brushstrokes and colours and shapes that dissolve.
The work belonged to the collection of Rufino J. Varela (1838-1911), a lawyer, politician and journalist who had a significant heritage of art pieces purchased over thirty years in Buenos Aires and Europe. In 1896 Varela sold a lot with some of his paintings, including this piece by Courbet, and others by authors such as Sorolla, Monvoisin, Rembrandt, Zurbarán and Corot among others. It was a common action in his family, several of its members were art collectors, and in the moments prior to their European trips they used to sell part of the collections in a gesture of social distinction that was read as a return to the country with new and expensive purchases. The Courbet painting was acquired at that sale by a young poet, Domingo D. Martinto (1859-1898), who had several works from the Barbizon school in his collection, and who donated it to the museum in 1897. The work was exhibited at the Bon Marché, where the museum operated in its first stage, in the Marinas room, and on the upper floor of the Argentine Pavilion, from September 1910 when the museum moved to that building. (Paola Melgarejo | MNBA)