Waves

Beneath a sky heavy with clouds, a great wave breaking in white is about to crash against the rocks in the foreground. The wave occupies the lower half of the picture and seems to rush toward the viewer's feet. Courbet used both brush and palette knife (a spatula-like tool) to distinguish the flying spray from the thick, heavy mass of the water.

Having been born and raised in Ornans, a mountainous region, Courbet found the sea an unfamiliar subject for a long time. From the late 1860s he began visiting the Normandy coast and painting the sea in earnest. Boudin and Monet were also working on this coast at the time, and the International Maritime Exhibition held in Le Havre in 1868 included works by Courbet, Manet, Monet, Boudin and others. This work has no story and no figures; it captures only the shifting waves and sky as they appeared. Other works on the same subject were painted in the same year.

The painting passed through Paris sales and galleries and was purchased in 1921 by Matsukata Kojiro. It was seized by the French government in 1944, returned to Japan in 1959, and entered the National Museum of Western Art.