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.'"
