1812 Paris – 1867 Barbizon
Paysage à la mare au crépuscule, c. 1860
Oil on panel, 15.5 x 21.9 cm
signed lower left: Th. Rousseau
Provenance:
Private collection, France
Mr. Michael Schulman has confirmed the authenticity after first-hand inspection of the painting. It will be included in his forthcoming supplement of the artist’s catalogue raisonné.
The landscape shown in Paysage à la mare au crépuscule appears monumental despite the painting’s modest size. The motif and composition seem related to Mare et lisière de bois, a larger, more elaborate yet less immediate panel owned by the French state, fig. 1. As in many of his landscapes, the dramatic rendering of the sky in strong, contrasting colors catches the eye.
Théodore Rousseau, one of the leading Romantic landscape painters and founding father of the so-called Barbizon School, was innovative and creative in his quest to display the beauty of nature. Essential in his work is the celebration of nature and the awareness of mankind’s fragility in the face of it. He drew inspiration from real passages of nature as well as from Dutch seventeenth-century landscape painters such as Jacob Ruisdael and Meindert Hobbema who had pioneered nature as the main subject of their paintings in a realistic manner.
Rousseau’s admiration for these artists transcends throughout his oeuvre, both in content and form. Furthermore, he experimented with materials and techniques and developed the free brushwork he is now celebrated for. Interestingly, this same loose application of paint made him the bêtes noires in the eyes of contemporary critics. His refusal to conform with the academic canon as well as with conservative rules of the Salon pre-1848 paved the way for the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, whose landscapes are considered as the foundation of Modernism. Rousseau may thus be considered a precursor of the avant-garde and its different manifestations throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Today, Rousseau’s plein-air paintings are celebrated for their free brushwork and avoidance of unnecessary detail.
Fig. 1 Théodore Rousseau, Mare et lisière de bois, oil on panel, 61 x 81 cm, Dépôt du Musée du Louvre en 1976. inv. : R.F.2386, Ville de Grenoble / Musée de Grenoble-J.L. Lacroix.
Recognition came to Rousseau relatively late in life. Although some of his work had been accepted by the Salon in the early 1830s, his paintings were continuously rejected between 1836 and 1841. He retaliated by boycotting the Salon in protest against the conservatism of the jury. This earned him the sobriquet le grand refusé. He explored the French countryside tirelessly, finding many of his motifs in the Auvergne and the Forest of Fontainebleau. A handful of critics and a number of his colleagues recognized his talent, this despite the repeated rebuffs his work had received from the official art establishment. The Revolution of 1848 – in which he had taken no active part – had temporarily weakened the power of academic juries.
A committee of artists, including Rousseau, took charge of the liberated Salon. In 1848, the French government offered him an important commission for the Musée du Luxembourg. In 1849, he successfully exhibited three paintings at the Salon and was awarded a first-class medal. Henceforth, he was released from the obligation of submitting his work to the jury. In the 1850s his luck finally turned. He was appointed as Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur in long-awaited recognition of his artistic achievement in July 1852. An entire gallery was dedicated to his work at the 1855 Paris World’s Fair.
Both national and international buyers beat a path to his door. But in 1860 misfortune struck. His wife’s mental health deteriorated, patrons deserted him and his own health suffered. Despite his election as president of the jury of the 1867 World’s Fair he remained deeply dissatisfied with his lack of social recognition. His health continued to decline and he relied increasingly on the support of his life-long friend, the painter Jean-François Millet. Napoleon III elevated him to the rank of Officier de la Légion d’honneur in 1867 but he had little time left to benefit from the award- he died in Barbizon in December of the same year.
Fig. 2 Nadar (1820-1910), Portrait photograph of Théodore Rousseau, c.1850-5.
1 Unruly Nature: The Landscapes of Théodore Rousseau, exhibit. cat., J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles and Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen, 2016-17, pp. 1-9.
2 Ibid., pp. 1-88.