The Painting: Rousseau undertook a six-month excursion to the Auvergne region of central France in 1830. This sketch represents just one facet of this journey, which was pivotal for the artist because it cemented his commitment to painting nature in all its plenitude and variety (see
Hamlet in the Auvergne). The work’s early history is unknown, and the precise site depicted is open to question, but its longstanding identification and date are convincing.
All the terrestrial elements were sketched initially using thinned brown paint. Rousseau did so rapidly, allowing the medium—in combination with the paper showing through the brushmarks—to denote forms and textures as well as the motion of the stream. He added more bodied, gray paint for the rocks and impasted white paint for the water. Touches of green were applied for foliage, blue for the sky, and white for clouds, allowing each layer to show through the next one, a technique known as scumbling. He also alternated between blue and green to add details where the colors meet, though the oil was still wet as he proceeded, and the colors mixed here and there.
By working in this fashion, Rousseau made clear his prerogative to employ speed and material economy to activate the surface in order to convey the wildness of the scenery. Another sign of the rapidity with which he worked is the appearance of fingerprints, perhaps accidentally in the browns and greens where they meet the sky at the top edge, but deliberately elsewhere: to the left and beyond the cascade is a hillside on the face of which is a group of straight strokes forming a sort of square; to soften it, Rousseau simply dabbed its center with the tip of his finger (see fig. 1 above). Rousseau provided a sense of the variety of his mark-making when he said, “I use the scraper, my thumb, a cuttlebone, and even, if necessary, the handle of my brush.”[1]
Its technique may appear to be virtuosic to modern eyes, but when Rousseau painted this work he did not intend for it to meet the gaze of the public. It was an exercise made spontaneously yet assuredly, under improvised circumstances. It was inconceivable to Rousseau and his contemporaries that a work lacking in finish like this one should be presented as a finished painting meant for display (
tableau). Indeed, one aim in making studies outdoors was to train the artist to discern what natural elements to include, edit, or omit as he or she proceeded to compose landscape paintings back in the studio (
paysages composés).
After 1830: Scholars have not focused on how Rousseau went on to use his Auvergne studies after 1830. This is largely due to the challenge of establishing a chronology for known finished works, which are few in number, produced before the mid-1830s. Even the
Landscape: Site in the Auvergne (Paysage: site d’Auvergne) with which Rousseau made his debut at the Salon of 1831 has not been identified definitively, though most scholars agree that it is probably the work known today as
Hilly Landscape with an Angler in the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen (fig. 2). This picture, none of whose details appear in precisely the same way in studies that precede it, is the result of a process of integration, and the general effect is reflective and somewhat vague. Might Rousseau have adopted elements of
A Stream in the Auvergne as he composed the escarpment above the stream on the right side of
Hilly Landscape with an Angler?
Confusion in the Literature Clarified: This painting was catalogued twice by Michel Schulman in
Théodore Rousseau, 1812–1867: Catalogue raisonné de l'oeuvre peint (Paris, 1999). The information Schulman provides under number 67 is largely accurate (see References). Under number 66, however, the information provided is incorrect, apart from the photograph illustrating this work. Furthermore, Schulman’s association of the present work with
Stream Coursing over Rocks at Dampierre in a Corner of the Valley of the Chevreuse is surely mistaken. The latter work is one described by Philippe Burty (in
Notice des études peintes par M. Théodore Rousseau exposées au Cercle des Arts, the catalogue of the exhibition held at the Cercle des Arts, Paris, in June 1867, no. 10) as
Cours d’eau à travers les roches de Dampierre. C’est un coin de la vallée de Chevreuse, envahie par les ronces; l’eau glisse sur des roches moussues, 1829, 36 x 45 cm. The picture described by Burty is almost certainly the study of a
Torrent, today in Buenos Aires (fig. 3).[2] It was painted twenty miles southwest of Paris in a far more careful, scrupulous style than the study in The Met's collection, and about one year earlier.
Asher Miller 2020
[1] “J’use du gratoir, du pouce, de la sèche, et s’il faut encore, du manche de mon pinceau.” Rousseau, quoted in Alfred Sensier,
Souvenirs sur Théodore Rousseau (Paris, 1872), p. 200. For the translation, see Scott Allan, “‘A Method Matters Little’: Rousseau’s Working Procedures as a Painter,” in Scott Allan and Edouard Kopp,
Unruly Nature: The Landscapes of Théodore Rousseau, exh. cat., J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 2016, pp. 37, 42 n. 107.
[2] Schulman 1999, p. 84, no. 10.
