Pierre Etienne Theodore Rousseau

Bio

From the 1830s until the triumph of landscape art at the 1867 Exposition Universelle, Théodore Rousseau was the most consistently controversial landscape painter working in France. His strong colors and bold paint touches, along with his penchant for unusual natural sites and surprising viewpoints, made Rousseau’s works a compelling counterpoint to the subtle lighting and lyrical mood that characterized the landscapes of Corot.

Rousseau grew up in Paris, the son of a tailor, and he received his first drawing lessons from a relative, the landscapist Pau de Saint-Martin. At thirteen he spent a year in the mountainous Franche-Comté working at a sawmill and he returned to the capital with a sketchbook full of woodland scenes and animal studies. In 1827 he entered the studio of Jean-Charles-Joseph Rémond, a landscape artist working in the officially promoted classical style. Copying in the Louvre, Rousseau studied both the carefully structured Italianate landscapes of Claude Lorrain and the more realistic country scenes of Dutch masters such as van de Velde and Dujardin. At the same time, he continued to paint in the woodlands around Paris where his friendship with Paul Huet introduced him to a much freer, more personalized landscape style and to the example of the English artists Bonington and Constable. During a lengthy summer trip through the Auvergne in 1830, Rousseau began to establish an independent style entirely his own. The forceful paint touches and unusual viewpoints of his sketches from that Auvergne voyage brought him the admiration of Ary Scheffer, a major force in the new Romantic movement.

Rousseau exhibited at the Salon for the first time in 1831 and three years later he won a third class medal for a painting of a recently cut timberland — a very unusual subject. But by 1836, Rousseau’s intense coloring and startling compositions made his pictures stand out as a direct threat to the more traditional landscape style promoted by Academic authorities. The Salon jury rejected his large painting of Descent of the Cattle that year, achieving a succés de scandale among young artists and their liberal supporters. For the next five years, Salon juries consistently refused Rousseau’s paintings, until he stopped attempting to exhibit. Throughout the late 1830s and the 1840s, Rousseau became a powerful force by his absence from the Salon and he acquired the nickname Le Grand Refusé. His pictures were occasionally exhibited privately in Paris and from time to time major paintings were illustrated in various periodicals. Influential members of the Romantic generation such as Eugéne Delacroix and the novelist George Sand drew attention to Rousseau’s cause. During these years, Rousseau traveled widely throughout France, often with fellow painter Jules Dupré; and around 1846-47 he moved to Barbizon as one of the first landscapists to make the tiny village just outside the Forest of Fontainebleau his permanent home. Only with the brief liberalization that followed the Revolution of 1848 did Rousseau return to the Salon exhibition. For the next seventeen years he exhibited regularly, precipitously rising and falling in public and critical esteem as he pressed forward with his own experiments in landscape painting. His ‘Japoniste’ colors and ‘pointilliste’ techniques often disturbed avant garde critics as much as they offended more conservative writers. Finally, an impressive retrospective of his major Salon paintings at the Exposition Universelle of 1867 (along with a ground-breaking dealer’s exhibition of his early paintings and sketches) established Rousseau’s leadership of the new school of French landscape beyond challenge.

Alexandra Murphy