Sunset, Vevey, Switzerland

Gustave Courbet painted this view of Lake Geneva in the last years of his life, while living in Switzerland because he could not go home. He had been one of the most famous and most argued-about painters in France, and the leader of a movement called Realism, which insisted on painting ordinary modern life instead of grand historical or religious subjects. In 1871 he took part in the Paris Commune, the short-lived revolutionary government of the city, and was jailed for six months once it fell. The French state then held him responsible for the cost of rebuilding a monument the Commune had pulled down, and in 1873 he crossed into Switzerland to escape the debt. He settled at La Tour-de-Peilz, a village on the lake shore a short walk from Vevey, and stayed there until he died in 1877. The lake and its shoreline became repeated subjects for him in these final years. A visitor chose this painting directly from Courbet's studio in 1874 on behalf of an American collector, noting that the artist's recent work was powerful but sombre in tone.