Les Dents du Midi

This rugged landscape captures the dramatic peaks of Les Dents du Midi, a mountain range in the Swiss Alps that clearly lived up to its name, "the teeth of noon," with those jagged, snow-capped summits. Gustave Courbet painted this scene during his time in Switzerland, where he fled in 1873 to escape political trouble in France after the fall of the Paris Commune. The artist spent his final years in exile there, and these mountains became a frequent subject of his work.

Courbet was a leading figure in the Realist movement, committed to painting the world as he actually saw it rather than idealizing it. You can see that honesty here in how he's rendered the rough, rocky foreground with its grazing cattle and the dark, mysterious valley below the mountains. The painting doesn't try to make the landscape more picturesque or romantic than it was. Instead, there's something almost somber about it, with those heavy clouds and shadowy areas suggesting the artist's own complicated feelings during this period of exile. The solid, weighty way he applies paint gives the whole scene a sense of permanence and gravity, as if these ancient mountains will outlast all human troubles.