Hi Subscriber,
How well do you understand the subject matter of the art you create?
Are you intimate with the fine details of how the organic material
grows? Do you understand architecture? Are you a student of the human
condition?
Today, Alfred Sensier describes an experience he had with Theodore
Rousseau that might change how you look at your inspiration.
Enjoy,
BoldBrush Studio Team
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Theodore Rousseau, Charcoal hut in the forest of Fontainebleau, oil on
canvas, c.1850
Theodore Rousseau, Charcoal hut in the forest of Fontainebleau, oil on
canvas, c.1850
Pierre-Étienne-Theodore Rousseau was a French landscapist of the
Barbizon School, often grouped with compatriots Corot and Daubigny. His
works are atmospheric and richly textured, capturing the lush
vegetation and dappled light that drew so many artists to the
Fontainebleau region. In a critical essay published in 1897, American
artist and art writer William A. Coffin quoted French artist Sensier,
who was a friend of Rousseau, describing Rousseau's paint handling and
dedication to studying nature:
"Alfred Sensier, in his excellent book, Souvenirs sur Theodore
Rousseau, writes of a visit to the artist when he was painting the last
of the four great works mentioned above. It is interesting to hear what
he says, for the picture itself affords a demonstration in its
technical processes of some of Rousseau's methods, which every one who
sees it may study:
'I went to see him in Indian summer, in November; his little house was
covered with clematis, nasturtium and cobaeas. . . He showed me a whole
collection of pictures, sketches, monotint studies, and compositions
"laid in," which made him ready for twenty years' work. He was
beginning his beautiful landscape, 'The Charcoal-Burner's Hut,' so
luminous and so limpid - an effect of high noon in September sunshine,
which he finished in 1850. He had laid it in with the right general
effect at the first painting on a canvas prepared in gray tints, and
after having placed his masses of trees and the lines of his landscape,
he was taking up, with the delicacy of a miniaturist, the sky and the
trunks of the trees, scraping with a palette-knife to half the depth of
the painting, and retouching the masses with imperceptible subtility of
touch. It was a patient labor, which finished by being disturbing, it
was so imperceptible.
It seems to you that I am only caressing my picture, does it not? That
I am putting nothing on it but magnetic flourishes? I am trying to
proceed like the work of nature itself, by accretions which, brought
together, or united, become forces, transparent atmospheric effects,
into which I put afterward definite accents as upon a woof of neutral
value. These accents are to painting what melody is to harmonic bass,
and they determine everything, either victory or defeat. The method is
of slight importance in these moments when the end of the work is in
sight; you may make use of anything, even of diabolical conjurings," he
said to me, laughingly, "and when there is need of it, when I have
exhausted the resources of the colors, I use a scraper, my thumb, a
piece of cuttle-bone, and even my brush-handles. They are hard trials,
these last moments of the day's work, and I often come out of them worn
out but never discouraged." Then stopping short in his talk, "Come, let
us go for a walk. I will show you a little of the law of growth of
vegetation in nature itself.'"
Theodore Rousseau, Charcoal hut in the forest of Fontainebleau
(detail), oil on canvas, c.1850
Theodore Rousseau, Charcoal hut in the forest of Fontainebleau
(detail), oil on canvas, c.1850
Coffin continues: "How well he knew that law! How well he understood
the penetrable nature of the soil and the solidity of the rock
formations! Look at the moss-covered earth in the foreground of 'La
Hutte du Charbonnier.' Do we not perceive at once that if a spade were
driven in it would strike the rock that lies a few inches under the
surface? It is so in 'Les Gorges d'Apremont,' and in every one of his
principal works there is the same veracity of rendering. I think we
must concede, in looking at Rousseau's work in its entirety, that no
man has made a closer study of nature. If he had merely given us
painstaking studies, however; if his pictures presented nothing more
than the facts, his place as a landscape-painter would be very far
below what it is. But his artistic perceptions were so keen, his sense
of the picturesque was so well developed, his feeling for the grandeur
and beauty of nature grew so strongly as he worked, that he was
impelled to recognize the harmony of all life out of doors, and
endeavored by synthetic treatment of his themes to unite facts with
broad impressions. To achieve such unity in a picture is the ne plus
ultra of painting, for such qualities as style, sentiment, and poetry
are but the results of the painter's individual success in expression."
If you'd like to read the rest of this essay, you can find it online in
this copy of Modern French Masters
.
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