Louis Dubois was an energetic supporter of Gustave Courbet, who led the French realism movement. A founder of the Free Society of Fine Arts in Brussels and a collaborator on their journal, L’Art Libre, Dubois adopted Courbet’s painterly approach as seen here in his vigorously rendered study of sand dunes on the Belgian coast. Although only a sketch, it is a dynamic composition of intersecting diagonals and strong contrasts of light and dark.