The work is accompanied by the authentication of the Institut Courbet with a scientific essay by Jean-Jacques Fernier, dated 19 September 2011

Paris, private collection;
Venice, Cardazzo collection;
Venice, Neri Pozza collection;
Bergamo, Lorenzelli collection;
Bergamo, Finazzi collection;
Milan, private collection.

Improperly defined as belonging to the "dark period" by Italian critics on the basis of the inciting opinions of Testori (a passionate and apologetic admirer of Courbet), Courbet's magnetic landscape owes to his greatest scholar, Jean-Jacques Fernier, a more detailed analysis on both a stylistic and critical level. Fernier, drafting the scientific file for the Institut Gustave Courbet, first traces its history as a collector; it was acquired in Paris in 1904 by Pietro Romanelli, then passed to the art dealer from Bergamo Bruno Lorenzelli, who was the first to correctly attribute it to the hand of the master of Ornans, then after some passages in Venice that Lorenzelli himself reported in his report - the famous gallery owner Carlo Cardazzo and the publisher Neri Pozza had it -, it passed to the Finazzi heirs where Fernier saw it in 2011 to analyse it de visu. "The work represents," writes Fernier, "a stream between two cliffs, the more distant one receiving, under a blue sky, the sun's rays while in the foreground, the cliff on the left and the bushes on the bank are in the shade of a summer's day. This is a recurring theme in Courbet's work in the 1870s." What strikes Fernier is the glow of the last landscapes of the Jura like this one that Courbet, starting from 1875, will never see again; a sort of final impression of his beloved native landscape. The work will be present in the volume in preparation, extension of the general catalogue. Courbet, a recognized and self-recognized genius in the Gascon terms of realism, demonstrates once again his adherence to nature without filters, with a rendering on the canvas of a modernity that will influence great artists of the twentieth century, first Morandi, then Morlotti and many others, in the line of twentieth-century naturalism. From the point of view of the pictorial tradition, he demonstrates his assimilation of the great Flemish and of the seventeenth-century contrast of light and shadow, as well as tuning in with the younger impressionists who saw him as a living myth, like Corot who died in 1875. The iconicity of this wonderful Rochers d'Ornans lies in a diagonal line that cuts the painting in two: on one side the shadow that envelops the pictorial material and the nature described and on the other the light, which while observing the painting, highlights the entire chromatic range with unexpected highlights of red, blue, purple, green.