GRAND GOLLIAT PAINTED BY GUSTAVE COURBET

GUSTAVE COURBET (1819-1877)

Grand Golliat (3,238m - 10, 623ft)

Italy - Switzerland border

In Le chalet dans la montagne, Suisse (Tour-de-Peilz, Vevey) vers 1874, oil on canvas, 
 The Pouchkine State  Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow

The mountain 

The Grand Golliat  (3,238m - 10, 623ft), also spelled Grand Golliaz is a mountain of the Pennine Alps, located between the Petit Col Ferret and the Great St. Bernard Pass. Is summit straddles the border between Switzerland and Italy, separating the Swiss canton of Valais from the Italian region of Aosta Valley. The name Golliat does not come from the Bible hero Goliath but from "Goilles" which are small lakes or water springs located on the Italian side of the mountain.

Huge bulwark made by two summits justified S-N: the Piccolo (3.234m) and the Grand Golliaz or Golliat;  the most important summit of the range between Mont Blanc and Velan-Combin Groups on the border ridge between Italy and Switzerland. Magnificent panoramic tower in the NW side of Val d'Aosta with a great round view even on Swiss giants. The bad quality rock doesn't allow fine climbing routes, the icy routes (N wall) are interesting but dangerous for the continuous rock falls in the channels. The SE side, ski-mountaneering route, requires well tidy snow.
The Grand Golliat is the southernmost mountain rising above 3,000 metres in Switzerland.
Source: 

- Summit post. org 

The painter 

Jean Désiré Gustave Courbet was a French painter who led the Realist movement in 19th-century French painting. Committed to painting only what he could see, he rejected academic convention and the Romanticism of the previous generation of visual artists. His independence set an example that was important to later artists, such as the Impressionists and the Cubists. Courbet occupies an important place in 19th-century French painting as an innovator and as an artist willing to make bold social statements through his work.

Courbet's paintings of the late 1840s and early 1850s brought him his first recognition. They challenged convention by depicting unidealized peasants and workers, often on a grand scale traditionally reserved for paintings of religious or historical subjects. Courbet's subsequent paintings were mostly of a less overtly political character: landscapes, seascapes, hunting scenes, nudes and still lifes. He was imprisoned for six months in 1871 for his involvement with the Paris Commune, and lived in exile in Switzerland from 1873 until his death.

Courbet  painted a few mountains in his life : the Juras mountains around Ornans ( France) and a few  mountains in Switzerland during his exil; Like many painters of the 19th Century, Courbet didn't name the mountain he painted; he liked to give a description of the general atmosphere rather than  a precise geographical location. 

 "I am fifty years old and I have always lived in freedom; let me end my life free; when I am dead let this be said of me: 'He belonged to no school, to no church, to no institution, to no academy, least of all to any régime except the régime of liberty."