Category:Puits-Noir by Gustave Courbet

English: Le Puits Noir, or The Black Well, is a place in the forest near Ornans where the little Breme River flows between high rocks from whose cracks grow luxuriant vegetation, forming a kind of high canopy over the quiet pool in the river. It is a place of enclosure and secrecy, filled with the rocks, foliage, and water for which Courbet loved to find painterly equivalents, and it was one of his favorite landscape motifs. In terms of the pictorial structures of his landscapes, Courbet was certainly not part of the tradition of the picturesque, with its focus on landscape motifs that were conceived of as being intrinsically pictorial. But the motifs to which he was drawn in his native region were not anonymous corners; rather they were natural features such as specific rock formations, river sources, and hidden glades. These places were already well enough known to the local people to have acquired such names as Le Puits Noir, or The Black Well. Gustave Courbet