Listening to Art

04.07: Gustave Courbet, La Source de la Loue


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Listening to Art, by William Denton.

Volume four, number seven: La Source de la Loue by Gustave Courbet.

Hello, and welcome to Listening to Art. I’m William Denton.

The end of Courbet’s life was unhappy. He was exiled from France over the destruction of the Vendôme Column during the Paris Commune and never returned. He died, after years of ill health, in 1877, aged 58.

Let us listen to a Courbet from happier times, in 1864, back in his home countryside. The Loue is a river in eastern France that runs near where Courbet grew up. He painted it, and its source where the water emerges from cliffs, many times. This particular version of this scene is one of the most beautiful paintings I have ever seen.

This is a painting, oil on canvas, 137.5 cm wide by 107.3 cm high.

Now let’s listen to La Source de la Loue by Gustave Courbet, recorded at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, in Buffalo, New York, on 16 July 2017.

Waveform of the field recording.

That was La Source de la Loue by Gustave Courbet. I hope you enjoyed listening to it as much as I did.

For more information and links to things I’ve mentioned, please visit listeningtoart.org.

Listening to Art is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Bibliography

All web sites accessed as of date of publication.

Albright-Knox Art Gallery. “La source de la Loue (The Source of the Loue).” Albright-Knox. https://www.albrightknox.org/artworks/19591-la-source-de-la-loue-source-loue.

Wikipedia, s.v. “Gustave Courbet,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustave_Courbet.

⸻, s.v. “Loue.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loue.