Cherubino Pata (French, 1827-1884)

Cherubino Pata is best known as Gustave Courbet's (see lot 40-41) most important pupil and assistant, working and travelling with his master during the last four year's of the his life.

However Pata was also an accomplished painter in his own right. The present lot, a monumental rendition of a famous waterfall in the Jura region of France (see fig. 1), is notable not only for its size, but also for its technique, in which colour is applied with a palette knife in large blocks to the give the paint surface an almost sculptural quality, which reinforces the sense of mass projected by the huge boulders and waterfall.