Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) was a French painter who led the Realism movement in 19th-century French painting. Committed to painting only what he could see, he rejected academic convention and the Romanticism of the previous generation of visual artists.

Gustave Courbet was born in the small town of Ornans in the mountainous Jura region of eastern France. The scenery around his home town often provided the subject for Courbet's landscape paintings.

Here the cliffs and dense greenery of the Loue valley near Ornans are set against an azure sky. Through his impressionistic style the artist has created a sense of the massive cliffs, and the rough surface of the paint imitates the textures of the terrain. The artist's rough technique, which was sometimes achieved by the application of paint with a palette knife, scandalised the contemporary art establishment.