The Washerwomen

(Constant Troyon)

At the center of The Washerwomen, a massive beech tree rises grand and golden against the sweeping clouds of a a breezy autumn day. That singular tree, and the smaller willow that nestles beside it, provide shelter for a row of bushes on which a local villager spreads her wet laundry, carried up from the pond in the foreground. Less obviously, the immense trees anchor an extraordinary breadth of open countryside that reaches far into the distance to a tiny village identifiable by its minuscule steeple half-hidden among trees. Troyon’s tour de force in controlling such an expansive landscape is a tribute to his particular ability to balance a real understanding of the lessons of contemporary English landscape models, particularly John Constable, with careful observation of his native French countryside.

The Washerwomen was probably painted around 1840, when Troyon was working primarily in Brittany or Orléans and was a close friend (as well as sometime-pupil) of Jules Dupré with whom he shared a background as a porcelain painter. Dupré was the only one of the Barbizon artists to actually travel to England and to copy the paintings of Constable, whose leadership in shifting landscape painting away from the classical models of Claude and Poussin toward recognizable native landscapes was much admired in France, even though direct acquaintance with Constable’s painting was rare. The recently rediscovered Washerwomen makes very clear that Troyon, too, was an admirer of Constable’s art and unusually adept at translating Constable’s achievement into French. The commonplace working site that Troyon has chosen for The Washerwomen, the scale and openness he has mastered in this large landscape, and the successful incorporation of a broad, high-keyed sky are all acknowledgements of modern English reworking of the conventions of Dutch seventeenth-century landscape painting. At the same time, the variety of human incident from the villagerwomen and their children in the foreground to the tiny figures beneath the trees along the right and or crossing the fields deep in the middleground is very characteristic of Troyon who continually strove to make his modern landscapes intelligible as well as appealing to a large audience. And the distinctive thick impasto that is manipulated throughout the foreground in the rocks, the rising ground along the left, and the central trees is also more typical of French painting than English — although on occasion it was precisely Troyon’s emphatic paint textures that most startled and offended conservative Salon critics.

Alexandra Murphy

Acquired by the Art Institute, Chicago

PROVENANCE: Mme. Levaigneur, Paris, her sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot, May 2-4, 1912, no. 19 (as La Mare); with Robert Hellebranth, Paris; anonymous sale, Zürich, Galerie Köller, November 11, 1981, no. 5047; anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, June 12, 1996, no. 44.

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