Théodore Rousseau | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | 15 April 1812 Paris, France |
| Died | 22 December 1867 (aged 55) Barbizon, France |
| Patron(s) | Jean-Charles-Joseph Rémond |
Étienne Pierre Théodore Rousseau (15 April 1812 –22 December 1867) was a French painter of the Barbizon school.
He was born in Paris, France in a bourgeois family. At first he received a basic level of training, but soon displayed aptitude for painting. Although his father regretted the decision at first, he became reconciled to his son forsaking business, and throughout the artist's career (for he survived his son) was a sympathizer with him in all his conflicts with the Paris Salon authorities. Théodore Rousseau shared the difficulties of the romantic painters of 1830, in securing for their pictures a place in the annual Paris exhibition. The influence of classically trained artists was against them, and not until 1848 was Rousseau presented adequately to the public. [1]
He had exhibited six works in the Salons of 1831, 1833, 1834 and 1835, but in 1836 his great work Paysage du Jura [La descente des vaches] was rejected by the Salon jury. He sent a total of eight further works to the Salon between 1836 and 1841; and yet none of them were accepted. Thereafter, he ceased sending work to the Salon until 1849, when all three of his submissions were accepted. He was not without champions in the press, and with the title of "le grand refusé" he became known through the writings of his friend Théophile Thoré, the critic who afterwards resided in England and wrote using the name Burger. [1]
During these years of artistic exile Rousseau produced some of his best pictures: The Chestnut Avenue, The Marsh in the Landes (now in the Louvre), Hoar-Frost (now in America); and in 1851, after the reorganization of the Salon in 1848, he exhibited his masterpiece, The Edge of the Forest (also in the Louvre), a picture similar in treatment to, but slightly varied in subject from, the composition called A Glade in the Forest of Fontainebleau, in the Wallace Collection at Hertford House, London. [1]
Until this period Rousseau had lived only occasionally at Barbizon, but in 1848 he took up his residence in the forest village, and spent most of his remaining days in the vicinity. He was now able to obtain fair sums for his pictures (but only about one-tenth of their value thirty years after his death), and the number of his admirers increased. He was still ignored by the authorities, even while his mentee Narcisse Virgilio Diaz was made Chevalier of the Legion of Honour in 1851. [2] Rousseau was left undecorated, but was nominated and awarded the Cross soon afterwards. He would eventually become an Officer of the Legion of Honor. [1]
At the Exposition Universelle of 1853, where all Rousseau's rejected pictures of the previous twenty years were gathered together, his works were acknowledged to form one of the best of the many splendid groups there exhibited. But, after an unsuccessful sale of his works by auction in 1861, he contemplated leaving Paris for Amsterdam or London, or even New York. [1]
Rousseau then suffered a series of misfortunes. His wife's mental health had worsened; his aged father became dependent on him for pecuniary assistance; his patrons were few. Moreover, while he was temporarily absent with his ill wife, a youth living in his home (a friend of his family) committed suicide in his Barbizon cottage. When he visited the Alps in 1863, making sketches of Mont Blanc, he became dangerously ill with inflammation of the lungs; and when he returned to Barbizon he suffered from insomnia and became gradually weakened. [1]
He was elected president of the fine-art jury for the 1867 Exposition; however, his disappointment at being denied the better awards may have affected his health, for in August he became paralyzed. He recovered slightly, but was again attacked several times during the autumn. In November his condition worsened, and he died in the presence of his lifelong friend, Jean-François Millet, on 22 December 1867. Millet, the peasant painter, for whom Rousseau had the greatest regard, had been much with him during the last years of his life, and at his death Millet assumed charge of Rousseau's ill wife. [1]
Rousseau's other friend and neighbor, Jules Dupré, himself an eminent landscape painter of Barbizon, relates the difficulty Rousseau experienced in knowing when his picture was finished, and how he, Dupré, would sometimes take away from the studio some canvas on which Rousseau was laboring too long. Rousseau was a good friend to Diaz, teaching him how to paint trees, for until a certain point in his career Diaz considered he could only paint figures.
Rousseau's pictures are always grave in character, with an air of exquisite melancholy. They are well finished when they profess to be completed pictures, but Rousseau spent so much time developing his subjects that his absolutely completed works are comparatively few. He left many canvases with parts of the picture realized in detail and with the remainder somewhat vague; and also a good number of sketches and water-color drawings. His pen work in monochrome on paper is rare. There are a number of good pictures by him in the Louvre, and the Wallace collection contains one of his most important Barbizon pictures. There is also an example in the Ionides collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. [1]
Jean Siméon Chardin was an 18th-century French painter. He is considered a master of still life, and is also noted for his genre paintings which depict kitchen maids, children, and domestic activities. Carefully balanced composition, soft diffusion of light, and granular impasto characterize his work.
Jean-François Millet was a French artist and one of the founders of the Barbizon school in rural France. Millet is noted for his paintings of peasant farmers and can be categorized as part of the Realism art movement. Toward the end of his career, he became increasingly interested in painting pure landscapes. He is known best for his oil paintings but is also noted for his pastels, Conté crayon drawings, and etchings.
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, or simply Camille Corot, was a French landscape and portrait painter as well as a printmaker in etching. A pivotal figure in landscape painting, his vast output simultaneously referenced the Neo-Classical tradition and anticipated the plein-air innovations of Impressionism.
Honoré-Victorin Daumier was a French painter, sculptor, and printmaker, whose many works offer commentary on the social and political life in France, from the Revolution of 1830 to the fall of the second Napoleonic Empire in 1870. He earned a living producing caricatures and cartoons in newspapers and periodicals such as La Caricature and Le Charivari, for which he became well known in his lifetime and is still remembered today. He was a republican democrat, who satirized and lampooned the monarchy, politicians, the judiciary, lawyers, the bourgeoisie, as well as his countrymen and human nature in general.
The Barbizon school of painters were part of an art movement toward Realism in art, which arose in the context of the dominant Romantic Movement of the time. The Barbizon school was active roughly from 1830 through 1870. It takes its name from the village of Barbizon, France, on the edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau, where many of the artists gathered. Most of their works were landscape painting, but several of them also painted landscapes with farmworkers, and genre scenes of village life. Some of the most prominent features of this school are its tonal qualities, color, loose brushwork, and softness of form.
Constant Troyon was a French painter of the Barbizon school. In the early part of his career he painted mostly landscapes. It was only comparatively late in life that Troyon found his métier as a painter of animals, and achieved international recognition.
Narcisse Virgilio Díaz de la Peña was a French painter of the Barbizon school.
François-Louis Français (1814–1897), usually known as Louis Français, was a French painter, lithographer and illustrator who became one of the most commercially successful landscape painters of the 19th century. A former pupil of Gigoux, he began his career by studying lithography and wood engraving, becoming a prolific illustrator and printmaker. His work as an illustrator is to be found in around forty books and numerous magazines from the late 1830s to the 1860s. Français also produced a large number of pen and ink drawings, enhanced by sepia, notable for their attention to detail and for their technical adroitness and conciseness.
William Morris Hunt was an American painter.
Barbizon is a commune (town) in the Seine-et-Marne department in north-central France. It is located near the Fontainebleau Forest.
Wyatt Eaton, baptised Charles Wyatt Eaton, was a Canadian-American portrait and figure painter, remembered as one of the founders of the Society of American Artists.
Jan Hendrik Weissenbruch, also known as Hendrik Johannes Weissenbruch was a Dutch painter of the Hague School. He is noted especially for his watercolours.
Jean Alexis Achard was a French painter.
Albert Heinrich Brendel, who was born in Berlin in 1827, studied in the Prussian Academy of Arts under Wilhelm Krause. In 1851 he went to Paris, and studied under Couture and Palizzi; thence to Italy, and home to Berlin in 1853, completing his studies under Carl Steffeck. For the next ten years he lived mainly in Paris, and worked in the summer months at Barbizon school, in the forest of Fontainebleau, which was also the scene of the labours of Jean-François Millet, Théodore Rousseau, Narcisse Virgilio Díaz, Constant Troyon, and other artists; and he continued, till 1869, to visit Barbison in the summer, after he moved in 1865 to Berlin for the winter. In 1868 he was made a member of the Berlin Academy, and in 1875 became professor at the Weimar Saxon-Grand Ducal Art School. His first works were sea-pieces, but afterwards he devoted himself to animal painting, in which he was very successful. He received medals at various exhibitions at Paris, Berlin, Munich, Vienna, and Nantes. He died in 1895.
Jules Louis Philippe Coignet was born in Paris in 1798 and died there in 1860. He was a noted landscape painter who had studied under Jean-Victor Bertin. He travelled a good deal in his own country as well as elsewhere in Europe and the East, and produced a considerable number of views. A regular exhibitor at the Paris Salon exhibitions, he was awarded a gold medal there in 1824 and was given state recognition by being made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour in 1836.
Lise with a Parasol is an oil on canvas painting by French artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir, created in 1867 during his early Salon period. The full-length painting depicts model Lise Tréhot posing in a forest. She wears a white muslin dress and holds a black lace parasol to shade her from the sunlight, which filters down through the leaves, contrasting her face in the shadow and her body in the light, highlighting her dress rather than her face. After having several paintings rejected by the Salon, Renoir's Lise with a Parasol was finally accepted and exhibited in May 1868.
Starry Night is an oil-on-canvas painting by Jean-François Millet completed in 1850 and retouched in 1865. One of Millet's few paintings that is exclusively a landscape, it is in Yale University Art Gallery, in New Haven.
The Winnower is the title of three oil on canvas paintings by French artist Jean-François Millet, created between 1847 and 1848. The first, now held at the National Gallery, in London, was painted in 1847-1848, and presented at the Salon of 1848. Subsequently, Millet created two other versions, one kept at the Louvre Museum, in Paris, much smaller than the original, and the other at the Musée d'Orsay, also in Paris.
The Sower is an oil painting by the French artist Jean-François Millet from 1850. It is one of several versions of the theme painted by Millet. The work has been part of collection of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston since 1917.
Attribution:
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Artists | |
| People | |
| Other | |
