This picture was included in the Exposition Universelle of 1867, and was bought from the artist in the same year by the Comte de Nieuwerkerque, Director of Museums, for Napoleon III, at the price of 2000 French francs.

[1] The landscape is currently housed and exhibited at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, and represents a gorge, a ravine through which runs a winding stream, its bed littered with rocks, between steep walls covered with wild vegetation.

Of this landscape, Courbet wrote:It is perhaps the best I have ever painted; it shows the Loue walled up between vast boulders of mossy rock, with thick sunlit foliage in the background.

[3]Courbet loved to seek out some unspoilt corner in these lonely gorges, where the damp atmosphere conveys the impression of a strange world from which the primordial waters have only just receded.

Courbet crushes his pigments and spreads them diagonally with his knife, thus letting underlying wads of paint show through: this creates the effect of transparency and depth as rich as those obtained by means of glazes in the work of earlier artists.