The Wave

A single green-grey wave curls against a heavy sky along the Normandy coast, its foam cresting against a band of pale horizon and low, broken cloud. Painted in 1869, this is one of the seascapes Gustave Courbet produced at Étretat during his last years of full activity in France before exile, and it belongs to the series that startled his contemporaries by treating the sea purely as a thing of matter and light rather than as a stage for drama or anecdote. The broad, heavy handling of the pigment and the almost abstract simplicity of the composition look forward to the modern seascape.