A masterpiece of Courbet's late seascape (marine) period, painted in Étretat, Normandy, during the summer of 1869. Courbet subverts Romantic conventions of the marine sublime by transforming water into dense, tactile physical matter. Applying thick impasto with a palette knife, he models the cresting wave with the weight and solidity of geological rock rather than fluid transparency. The kinetic gravity, dark storm-laden horizon, and raw material reality of the paint deeply impacted Paul Cézanne and anticipated Modernist landscape abstraction.