Around a hundred masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay will circulate in museums across France to raise awareness of climate change, the Musée d’Orsay and the Ministry of Culture announced this Tuesday, January 21. Among a painting by the famous Comtois painter.
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From Ornans, Brest to Tulle, Tours, Avignon via Pont-Aven or Saint-Quentin, 49 paintings, drawings, photographs or masterpieces will travel to 12 regions of France in the coming months. Also around fifty in Paris.
“Becoming aware of climate change and above all becoming aware of the need to act, this also involves our sensitivity. This way of circulating works, of taking them to meet audiences, and especially audiences who are far from the large urban centers, it must become a reflex”declared Minister of Culture Rachida Dati during the presentation of this event. Also aims to facilitate access to culture, particularly in rural areas.
As part of this event, the Courbet Museum located in Ornans in Doubs will exhibit within its walls from March 22 to October 19, 2025, the painting by the master Courbet which measures 98 cm by 66 cm. The painting in the Musée d’Orsay is also a variant, of the same dimensions, of another Trout kept at the Kunsthaus Zurich.
-After serving the six months in prison to which he had been sentenced for his participation in the Commune of 1871, Courbet spent some time in his native Franche-Comté before his definitive exile in Switzerland. It was during this period that he executed several still lifes of fish, inspired by the gigantic trout brought out by the fishermen of the Loue, the river which waters Ornans.
The Trout by Gustave Courbet, painted on his return to Franche-Comté, has always been perceived and understood as a representation of the painter himself. These imposing specimens populating the Loue, the matrix river of the valley where the master of Ornans was born, could not be a better symbol of the painter rooted in his “country”.
Abundant in Courbet’s time, wild trout have today become rare. La Loue is experiencing increasing eutrophication, leading to waves of mortality in its aquatic fauna. This major ecological problem calls for the mobilization of everyone in order to save this “river of hearts” from slow agony, recalls the Musée d’Orsay.
Around La Truite by Gustave Courbet, workshops with art historians, experts in wildlife and aquatic environments, young children living in the Loue valley, farmers, fishermen, environmental activists and even local actors in charge of protecting rivers and the Loue.
On the occasion of this exceptional loan, a series of events will be offered on all the sites of the Courbet center, in the heart of the Pays de Courbet and the Loue valley.
The program will include creative workshops for young people, a screening of the film Fario in the presence of its director Lucie Prost, which explores the issue of preserving biodiversity and trout fishing, a thematic guided tour with a museum mediator and a fishing guide, as well as a day dedicated to biodiversity, in collaboration with local stakeholders.
