Edge of the Forest, near the Gorges d'Apremont

(Pierre Etienne Theodore Rousseau)

Although Rousseau ranged across the French countryside more widely than any other artist of his time, it is with Barbizon and especially the nearby Forest of Fontainebleau that he is most enduringly associated. For more than thirty years he painted the ancient trees and rocky highlands of the vast, varied terrains that had once formed a Royal hunting preserve; and during the Paris building boom of the Second Empire, Rousseau fought to protect the Forest from lumbering and quarrying encroachments, even accosting the Emperor himself on the subject. Edge of the Forest, near the Gorges d’Apremont, completed in 1866, is one of the last exhibition-scale pictures Rousseau painted of the Forest he loved so possessively.

Deep in the middle ground of Edge of the Forest… a small troop of cows lolling in a shadowy chestnut grove (while their herder talks with a horseback traveler at the woodland edge) provides an appealing vignette that identifies Rousseau’s site as a dormoir, one of the sheltered grazing areas on the rock-strewn plateaus that crown the Gorges d’Apremont in the Forest of Fontainebleau. Favored by herdsmen because the plateaus offered the only accessible ponds in the Barbizon region and endlessly fascinating to Rousseau (and dozens of other painters and photographers as well) because of the dramatic vistas and diverse foliage, the Gorges are a long chain of limestone outcroppings that stretch from the southern limits of Barbizon deep into the Forest proper. Rousseau had painted or drawn aspects of the Gorges d’Apremont since his first visits to Barbizon during the 1830s. The high finish and intricate coloring of Edge of the Forest… mark this large painting as the culmination of long observations of a much-loved landscape. Under a roiling sky of extraordinary power, Rousseau brought into balance the majesty and the minutiae of forest life, addressing the colorful ferns and mosses that cushion the Forest floor with the same inventive attention that he lavished on the boughs of the massive oaks and chestnut trees that anchor his composition. In parallel to the clean white clouds welling up into the lavender-grayness of a departing storm, Rousseau centered Edge of the Forest… with a stretch of sunlit pasture; and just as sunlight breaks up the darkness above, it weaves through the tree trunks and slowly slides across the chain of shallow pools in a still-shadowy foreground. Animals, figures, lichens and trees are built up from similar touches of strongly colored paints that bind man inextricably into his surroundings. The brilliant orange tints that are woven throughout the entire composition and the unusually intense greens that sparkle in smaller flashes around the painting center are a reminder that Rousseau was one of the very first landscape artists to translate the vibrant color contrasts of Japanese prints (which so fascinated artistic Paris during the 1860s) into his own art.

Rousseau took the basic disposition of the trees in Edge of the Forest… from a drawing he had made perhaps a decade earlier (Les Chåtaigniers de Barbizon, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen; no. 471 in M. Schulman’s catalogue raisonné of Rousseau drawings). But when he moved to a larger format, Rousseau opened up the central stretch of grassy pasture and emphasized the complex sequence of spaces glimpsed through tree trunks that animates the whole painting.

Rousseau’s substantial success at the Exposition Universelle of 1855 had brought the artist a new group of dealers and clients, many of them prominent financiers and industrialists associated with the Imperial court. These demanding patrons (whom Rousseau often kept waiting many years for their commissioned pictures!) expected large paintings carefully finished to adorn grand new homes on the recently opened boulevards of Haussmann-ized Paris. Edge of the Forest, near the Gorges d’Apremont was unknown to scholars before its appearance at auction in 1952, when a member of the Rothschild family of Vienna consigned it for sale. Baron Nathaniel de Rothschild of Paris had been a patron of Rousseau and he may well have acquired the picture directly from the artist, or arranged its acquisition by another family member.

Alexandra Murphy

PROVENANCE: Louis de Rothschild, Vienna, sold Parke-Bernet Galleries, New York, March 5, 1952, lot 23; B. Kryl.

LITERATURE: Pierre Miquel and Galerie Brame & Lorenceau will reproduce this painting in the Catalogue raisonné of Théodore Rousseau’s paintings now in preparation.

Matthiesen Gallery &Stair Sainty Matthiesen, ‘The Gallic Prospect’, 1999