Th Odore Rousseau

The 19th century in France witnessed the emergence of the structures of the modern art market that remain until this day. This book examines the relationship between the avant-garde Barbizon landscape painter, Théodore Rousseau (1812-1867), and this market, exploring the constellation of patrons, art dealers and critics who surrounded the artist. It argues for the pioneering role of Rousseau, his patrons and his public in the origins of the modern art market, and, in so doing, shifts attention away from the more traditional focus on the novel careers of the Impressionists and their supporters. Drawing on extensive archival research, the book provides new insight into the role of the modern artist as professional. It provides a new understanding of the complex iconographical and formal choices within Rousseau's work, rediscovering the original radical charge that once surrounded the artist's work and led to extensive and peculiarly modern tensions with the market place.

Théodore Rousseau (1812–1867), arguably the most important French landscape artist of the mid-nineteenth century and a leader of the so-called Barbizon School, occupies a crucial moment of transition from the idealizing effects of academic painting to the radically modern vision of the Impressionists. He was an experimental artist who rejected the traditional historical, biblical, or literary subject matter in favor of “unruly nature,” a Romantic naturalism that confounded his contemporaries with its “bizarre” compositional and coloristic innovations. Lavishly illustrated and thoroughly documented, this volume includes five essays by experts in the field. Scott Allan and Édouard Kopp alternately examine Rousseau’s diverse techniques and working procedures as a painter and as a draftsman, as well as his art’s mixed economic and critical fortunes on the art market and at the Salon. Line Clausen Pedersen’s essay focuses on Mont Blanc Seen from La Faucille, Storm Effect, an early touchstone for the artist and a spectacular example of the Romantic sublime in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek’s collection. This catalogue accompanies an eponymous exhibition on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum from June 21 to September 11, 2016, and at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek from October 13, 2016, to January 8, 2017.

These paintings - dreams of nature as a web of life in which human beings occupy a peripheral role - overwhelmed Rousseau's contemporaries with their novel light effects, original perspective, and "sheer profusion of visual sensation." While Baudelaire considered them superior to even Corot's works, they baffled art critics and have never fit convincingly into the received categories of naturalism, "pre-Impressionism," or modernism."--Jacket.