The Musée Courbet in Ornans occupies the house where Gustave Courbet was born in 1819, and it is the most important Courbet museum in France. The collection includes paintings, drawings, and personal effects, displayed in the rooms where he grew up and in purpose-built gallery spaces around the original building.
Courbet was one of the founders of Realism in painting, and many of his most powerful works depict the Loue valley and its inhabitants with an unflinching directness that was scandalous in mid-nineteenth-century France. The museum contextualises his work with landscape photographs and historical material about Ornans and the valley, making it easier to see what he was looking at when he painted. The building itself, hanging over the river, is a handsome example of old Franche-Comté domestic architecture.