Seascape at Saint Aubin 

Gustave Courbet created this seascape at Saint Aubin using oil on canvas. Note how Courbet isn’t so interested in the ‘art’ of painting, as in, the skilled representation of a scene. Instead, he embraces the materiality of his medium. Look closely, and you’ll see how he loaded the paint onto his brush. It’s almost sculptural – the pigment seems to stand in for the objects themselves: the rocks, the vegetation, the sky. Even the waves have a distinct thickness. It is a landscape built up from the stuff of the earth. Courbet was known for his ‘realist’ paintings, which aimed to depict the world as it actually was. But his attention to the viscosity and texture of oil paint is just as crucial to this aesthetic. It’s not just about accurately representing nature; it’s also about understanding how nature, like art, is made.