Landscape with Rocks Gustave Courbet

The paintings by Gustave Courbet in the Museum of Fine Arts Budapest are all outstanding but for different reasons. The Cedar Tree at Hauteville stands out among the landscapes he produced during his career not only for its exceptional beauty, but also for its art historical importance. Courbet often worked in the Eastern French province of Franche-Comté, whose local scenery, in all its complex beauty, left a deep impression on him. It is unsurprising that Paul Cezanne, whose wife, Hortense Fiquet, came from the neighbouring Swiss canton, was enthralled by the landscapes Courbet painted here, which were highly structured and incorporated subtle symbols as reactions to human destinies and characters. Here, the cedar stands all alone, its dried-out branches exposed, with an empty bench beneath it, waiting for weary excursionists. The interplay of horizontal and vertical lines would later be taken up and refined by Cezanne, and seen from today’s perspective, the viewers’ thoughts may wander from this masterpiece of French realism to works of twentieth-century constructivism, such as the strangely structured apple tree painted in the 1910s by Piet Mondrian, which introduced the principles of geometric abstraction.

Genthon, István, Modern francia festmények: Szépművészeti Múzeum Budapest, Remekművek magyarországi gyűjteményekből/Meisterwerke aus ungarischen Sammlungen/Art treasures in Hungarian collections/Chefs d’oeuvre dans les collections hongroises, Corvina, Budapest, 1972, p. 14.

Illyés, Mária, Verő, Mária (ed.), XIX. századi francia művek, A Szépművészeti Múzeum gyűjteményei/The Collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest 4, Szépművészeti Múzeum, Budapest, 2001, p. 68-69.

Bätschmann, Oskar – Causey, Faya – van Faassen, Sjoerd – Forgács, Éva – Janssen, Hans – Lebensztejn, Jean-Claude – Tompkins Lewis, Mary – Ozerkov, Dmitrij – Ruppen, Fabienne – Shiff, Richard – Smith, Paul – Bodor, Kata – Fehér, Dávid – Gergely, Mariann – Geskó, Judit – Gonda, Zsuzsa – Kovács, Anna Zsófia – Orosz, Márton – Somodi, Anett – Szeredi, Merse Pál – Tóth, Ferenc – Warman, Jayne, Geskó, Judit (ed.), Cezanne-tól Malevicsig: Árkádiától az absztrakcióig, Szépművészeti Múzeum, Budapest, 2021, p. 210-211., no. 16.