Theodore Rousseau
French , 1812-1867

The Valley of Saint-Ferjeux, Doubs, 1860-1862 ca.
oil on canvas
33 3/8 x 53 1/4 in.

SBMA, Gift of Lady Leslie Ridley-Tree in honor of Phillip Johnston
2007.37



Undated photo of Rousseau.

“The most flamboyant painter of this age, the Eugene Delacroix of his genre ... the leading landscape painter in the world.”
- Jules de la Rochenoire, Salon de 1855 (Paris 1855)

“Rousseau’s visual language was underpinned by an intensely subjective attitude to nature. Emerging out of the Romantic movement, he believed that his views of nature should be carriers of meaning and emotion.” - Simon Kelly, Theodore Rousseau and the Rise of the Modern Art Market: An Avant-Garde Landscape Painter in Nineteenth Century France (2021)

RESEARCH PAPER

From the vantage point of the 21st century, at first glance there might appear to be nothing revolutionary about this painting, used as we are to the work of the innovative luminaries of the 20th century - think Pablo Picasso or Joan Miro, for example, to name just two. But in 19th century France, there was indeed a landscape revolution in art, and Theodore Rousseau was at its forefront.

A master at capturing the beauty of the natural world, Rousseau was one of the leaders of a group of artists who collectively came to be known as the Barbizon School, a loose association of artists who worked around the village of Barbizon, located just outside Paris near the Forest of Fontainebleau. Its members came from different backgrounds and worked in a range of styles but they were drawn together by their passion for painting en plein air and their rejection of a convention that limited landscape to a supporting role as the background for scenes from literature, myth, and history. Their landscapes affirmed that nature itself was a subject worth painting (The Art Story, The Barbizon School, https://www.theartstory.org/movement/barbizon-school.) Landscapes offered infinite painterly potential with their array of natural phenomena, capricious weather and changing light. This is the context in which our painting was created.

Although many of Rousseau’s paintings portray scenes from the environs of the forest of Fontainebleau, this one depicts a valley in the region of Doubs in eastern France. It appears to be unfinished: some areas, for example the trees at the right of the canvas, are blocked out but not fully worked up to Rousseau’s customary level of detail. Rousseau was known for his habit of painting directly from nature and later adding details and completing the work in his studio: he was also notorious for not being able to decide when a painting was finished. This ambitiously scaled landscape may have been intended for exhibition at the Paris Salon, or it may have been abandoned before completion. We do not know.

Looking at the painting, we see that the canvas is divided into three distinct planes. Rousseau frequently used a technique he termed “plainimetrie” the articulation of space through receding horizontal planes, and this painting is an example of that technique with the flat dark land of the foreground, the trees bordering the hills in the middle ground, and the expansive sky.

The foreground is indistinct, painted in shades of brown toned with black. Perhaps it’s uncultivated land, although there is a small area of green at center, abutting the trees, which might be evidence of some cultivation. What little detail there is, is sketched in white outlines. Could the outlines be guides for further development of this work by the artist? Maybe. But a contemporary critic observed that since Rousseau’s eye tended to focus on the horizon, his foregrounds must necessarily be sketchy “by design and system.“ (Prosper Haussard, Le National, (March 19, 1851) quoted in Simon Kelly, supra.)

Marking the boundary between the dark foreground and the luminous hills of the middle ground is a line of trees. The trees are not painted in detail, but they convey both mass and verticality. Barely visible in the row of trees, at center is what appears to be the red roof of a single dwelling. Behind the trees, on the left, at the base of the hills, we glimpse a cluster of little houses arranged along the thin line that separates the foreground from the middle ground. Rousseau's artistic focus was not on the evidence of human habitation but on the natural world. Nevertheless, the small buildings in the middle distance convey a sense of scale.

In the middle ground, Rousseau uses a luminous palette of greens and yellows to portray a range of hills, including the one in the center, with its distinctive bump. The hills appear bathed in a golden light and recede to form the horizon.

The third plane is the sky. We see atmospheric clouds in subtle gradations of color - pink, pale lemon, and white. The painted surface of the sky and clouds is shiny in comparison to the other parts of the canvas, because Rousseau used transparent glazes of thin pigment - for example in the pink glaze rubbed over the raised white paint of the small cloud at center. Here we see evidence of Rousseau’s technique of building color upon color and the textural result.

In terms of composition, the eye does not linger on the foreground; instead, Rousseau directs it to the center of the canvas, including the hill with the distinctive bump and the adjacent part of the sky. Note how Rousseau deepened and darkened the colors at the four corners of the canvas to help frame the focal point as a lighter and brighter, almost elliptical, shape. Throughout his career, Rousseau was obsessed with the representation of light and often structured his compositions by powerful chiaroscuro contrasts.

Commenting on some of Rousseau’s earlier works, the French poet Charles Baudelaire described “twilight effects—strange and moisture-laden sunsets—massive, breeze-haunted shades—great plays of light and shadow,” adding that “his color is magnificent, but not dazzling. The fleecy softness of his skies is incomparable.”" (Baudelaire, “The Salon of 1846” in Mayne ed, Art in Paris, 1845–1862 (London: Phaidon, 1965), 109.) Although this painting is from a later period, it too demonstrates some of these captivating effects.

Rousseau died at age fifty-five, after a career that can only be characterized as one of tumultuous ups and downs. He was repeatedly met by a chilly reception and rejections from the Paris Salon, and in 1841, he chose therefore to boycott it entirely, even though it was the uppermost tier of the official art scene in France. His absence became synonymous with a growing dissatisfaction with the Salon, and Rousseau was soon celebrated as "le Grand Refusé". When political winds began to blow in his favor, Rousseau made a comeback, casting him as a heroic martyr who not only conquered the art scene but also won a seat on the Salon jury. (Art History News, Theodore Rousseau, Unruly Nature, https://arthistorynewsreport.blogspot.com/2016/10/theodore-rousseau-unruly-nature.html (2016).)

Rousseau’s legacy was a significant one. The combination of his fascination with nature and his technical skill helped formulate an entirely new vocabulary of expression within the landscape genre, one that would be built upon by such renowned Impressionist artists as Claude Monet and Camille Pissaro.

Prepared for the Santa Barbara Museum of Art Docent Council by Laini Melnick, 2023

Bibliography

Art History News, "Theodore Rousseau, Unruly Nature", https://arthistorynewsreport.blogspot.com/2016/10/theodore-rousseau-unruly-nature.html
(2016)

The Art Story, "The Barbizon School", https://www.theartstory.org/movement/barbizon-school (2023)

Simon Kelly, "Theodore Rousseau and the Rise of the Modern Art Market: An Avant-Garde Landscape Painter in Nineteenth Century France" (2021)

Karen Grimme, "Impressionism", (2022)

POSTSCRIPT

A work in progress:
In fall of 2011, the Museum's new Assistant Director and Chief Curator, Eik Kahng reexamined this painting. With a closer look she declared it to be unfinished. Although this work of art is incomplete, she declared that it was in superb condition and gave an excellent insight to the artist's technique. The thin, lightness of applied paint and sketch like brush stroke, forever waiting for completion, and forever looking toward Impressionism. - Loree Gold, 2012

COMMENTS

Rousseau: The Artist’s Technique:

Rousseau was first accepted in the Salon of 1833. He was criticized then for “superficial brushwork” and “overly broad execution” leading to “undefined composition.” From the time of the Salon of 1857 he was attacked for the way he lighted his subjects, artificially highlighting the center, and also for overworking. He was said by artist friends to have had great difficulty finishing his paintings, sometimes loading the surface with thick paint. Jules Dupre, a fellow Barbizon painter, wrote that he physically removed from Rousseau’s studio, works upon which the artist was laboring too long.

How does our late painting fit in? Because Rousseau spent so long working up his subjects, his entirely completed works are few, and he left many canvases like ours, with parts of the picture realized and with other parts vague. Docents might ask or point out how the canvas is divided (into three distinct planes ). On which has the artist worked the most? (The sky is developed the most. The artist painted wonderfully atmospheric clouds in subtle gradations of color.) The surface of the sky is shiny in comparison to the land areas because Rousseau used transparent glazes of thin pigment mixed with oil medium in the finish. An example, easy to see, is the pink glaze (alizarin crimson) rubbed over the raised (scumbled) white paint of the small cloud at center. Very little under-painting is still visible in the sky compared to the trees in the middle ground at the right, for example. Here the quick scrubbing of the artist’s brush back and forth appears free and unfinished. Rousseau once said that he made “portraits of trees and listened to their voices,” but these trees were so quickly sketched that we see the toned canvas beneath. The dilute paint was thinned with turpentine; Rousseau was still working “thin” and had not progressed to thicker oil medium. Artists traditionally work from thin to thick and dark to light.

The foreground is dark and indistinct. Brown-green (burnt umber), toned still darker with black, is brushed over rust-brown (burnt sienna). Deep values and warmth bring an area forward (the opposite of atmospheric perspective). What little detail is given is sketched in white outlines, which could be considered guidelines for further development of the painting. Of course, they might also be considered the suggestion of silver morning mist. However, if Rousseau was a late Romantic depicting picturesque peasant life, it is interesting to consider what this area of the painting represents. Is it marsh land or perhaps cleared, not-yet-tamed forest land? In “ Art and Ecology in Nineteenth-Century France: The Landscapes of Theodore Rousseau” (Princeton University Press, 2000), Greg Thomas looks from a current viewpoint, “Rousseau could not have posited a self-sustaining natural equilibrium since he preferred places where plants, animals, and people struggled to adapt to damaged environments.” Rousseau, says Thomas, painted inhabited places “where a very small population eked out a miserable living by grazing animals or collecting firewood in ways that were in fact harming the forest.” A related question could be: What is the mood? Is the painting contemplative and serenely harmonious or melancholy and discordant? Would lovers meet and children laugh and play here?

Rousseau did not intend the eye to linger over the foreground. Although he did not use the classical landscape formula of Claude Lorrain in which the middle ground is a stage framed by trees, he did direct the viewer to the center by darkening edges at the sides and top of the canvas, creating a kind of ellipse. The center is painted lighter and brighter so that the focal area includes the hill with an odd “bump.” The distinctive features of this hill indicate that the artist observed and painted actual topography rather than an idealized or generic subject. Directly below the center, the dark foreground is faintly lighter, almost like a reflection, adding to the elliptical effect of the composition. Rousseau’s compositions connect him to the Dutch and English landscape painters who preceded him, as does his use of earth-based pigments. His dedication to depicting landscapes truthfully from his outdoor sketches (even though his paintings were always done in his Paris studio) makes him a predecessor to the Impressionists.

- Ellen Lawson, Senior Docent

SBMA CURATORIAL LABELS

Rousseau probably intended this large-scale work for the Salon. However, compared to other works of a similar size, it is clear that this painting is unfinished, with large areas of the composition blocked out but not fully worked up to the artist’s customary level of detail. It is an interesting record of Rousseau’s working methods, by which he built up successive layers of pigment to achieve a complex, textured surface. Nevertheless, this sweeping view of a valley in the Doubs region of the Franche-Comté, an area of France near the Swiss border, testifies to Rousseau’s mastery even in the last decade of his career.

- Ridley-Tree Reinstallation, 2022


The Barbizon school was led by two artists who dedicated themselves to painting outdoors and, in particular, in the environs of the Fontainebleau Forest outside of Paris: Camille Corot and Théodore Rousseau. Along with Jules Dupré, Van Gogh held these interconnected artists in the highest esteem. Not only did they pursue the depiction of nature and its ‘truth’ single-mindedly, but they also banded together as a group, supporting and encouraging each other’s efforts. The idea of an artists’ colony, such as the one they formed in the village of Barbizon, became a model for Van Gogh’s own fantasy of a similar colony that he hoped to found in Arles—a fantasy, given the disastrous visit of Paul Gauguin to his “Studio of the South,” that would never materialize.

Rousseau was notorious for not being able to decide when a painting was fi nished. This ambitiously scaled landscape may have been intended for display at the Salon, though its comparatively underdeveloped foreground may mean that the artist abandoned the composition before it was completed. Nevertheless, it refl ects the artist’s intimate understanding of the topography of the Doubs region of the Franche-Comté, near the Swiss border, and his sensitivity to nuances of light to which Van Gogh immediately responded.

- Through Vincent's Eyes, 2022