From Paris to the Auvergne: Between 1826 and 1830 Rousseau studied in the Paris atelier of landscape painter Charles Rémond. As part of his curriculum he produced sketches and studies out of doors. This practice was well established in the decades that witnessed the rise of landscape as an independent genre of painting, a development ratified by the Academy of Fine Arts’s establishment of a Prix de Rome in the category of historical landscape painting (
paysage historique). The prize was awarded every four years, beginning with Achille-Etna Michallon in 1817, followed by Rémond in 1821, and André Giroux in 1825. Laureates were entitled to spend four years at the Villa Medici, the Academy’s outpost in Rome.
Rousseau competed unsuccessfully for the Prix de Rome in the spring of 1829. (The winner was Jean-Baptiste Gibert.) His immediate options for sketching outdoors continued to be limited to countryside relatively close to Paris, ranging north to the Forest of Compiègne and south to the Forest of Fontainebleau. He must have grown impatient to travel farther afield. By June 1830, the eighteen-year-old artist was in the Auvergne, a remote area of the Massif Central in south-central France that had recently grown in popularity among landscape painters for its rugged, mountainous terrain. Rousseau’s biographer Alfred Sensier provided a general itinerary: Thiers and Royat in volcanic area of Puy de Dome, then south to the Cantal region to explore the valleys of Thiézac and Saint-Vincent, Falgou, the Roches de Macbey, and the banks of the river Cère, taking in the ruined castles of Recoule and Muret.[1] Some fifty studies from the Auvergne trip, encompassing drawings and oil sketches, are known.[2]
The Painting: The Auvergne gave rein to Rousseau’s ongoing affinity for the panoramic vista, a format to which the young artist was already partial (see, for example, The Met
32.100.133]. New, however, was the opportunity to gain high ground and survey dramatic landscape from above—to revel in plunging, bird’s-eye views, as he evidently did when he painted the present work. The centerpiece of this study is a hamlet nestled at the base of a steep cliff among undulating, swelling hills. With its swathes of red volcanic stone and the ruined château de Murol piercing the sky at the far right, the site has been identified tentatively as the plateau of the Dent du Marais.[3]
Rousseau scanned the landscape not only laterally but longitudinally, recording its exaggerated topography faithfully. The irregularity of the scenery forced the artist to approach it with fresh eyes and an off-the-cuff technique. He began by laying in the composition with thinned, ruddy brown paint. From the outset he was attentive to nuances of light and shade, applying the medium more heavily to signify pools of shadow beneath the mottled sky. This brown layer was left broadly exposed. Responsive not only to the land and its physical features but also to fleeting atmospheric conditions, Rousseau selectively added a range of greens: vibrant and bodied for fields exposed to direct sunlight, mellower where it is applied thinly over the initial brown lay-in, and mixed with gray to indicate shadow in the distance. Rock faces and stone cottages, glinting here and there in the sun, were rendered in grays, their solid forms appropriately built up with impasted paint.
A Hamlet in the Auvergne conveys the thrill of personal discovery, of witnessing the vast prospect for the first time. The sense of awe it embodies is akin to that experienced by the early Renaissance humanist Petrarch (1304–1374), whose watershed ascent of Mont Ventoux in Provence prompted him “to look about me and see what we had come to see.” The sheer number and variety of studies Rousseau produced in the Auvergne—this is one of the largest—make clear that he enjoyed his climbs, the views they afforded, and adapting his technique to the specific character of each site.[4]
Rousseau Returns to Paris, 1830 and After: Rousseau’s contemporary, the art writer Théophile Silvestre, wrote: “This journey of six months in 1830 was his own little revolution.”[5] There is no precise account of Rousseau’s return to Paris, but Sensier makes clear that the young painter could no longer square his ambitions with being Rémond’s follower: “Rémond anathematized him . . . and thought his landscapes the product of delirium . . . .”[6] Later in life, Rousseau denied that Rémond had influenced his early development, but Sensier’s brief statement implies that Rousseau remained in contact with his former teacher until at least the end of 1830. If Rémond did harbor reservations about Rousseau’s virtuosic plein-air studies, which is debatable, it is difficult to see why. Perhaps more telling is a comparison with Rousseau’s first submission to the Salon,
Paysage; site d’Auvergne in 1831. The painting is generally thought to be the one now known as
Hilly Landscape with an Angler (see fig. 1 above), a
paysage composé, in which the artist synthesized motifs he had recorded in his plein-air sketches. Its gauzily painted forms stand in sharp contrast to Auvergnat scenery as depicted in the elder painter’s heroic landscapes, one example of which is
Les Sources de Royat (Cascade de Royat) (fig. 2).
Whatever the precise circumstances surrounding Rousseau’s new independence, the young artist soon found a champion in the influential history painter Ary Scheffer (1795–1858), who placed a selection of Rousseau's Auvergne sketches on view in his studio. It is possible, but by no means certain, that the present sketch was among them. One result of Scheffer’s support was to stimulate interest in Rousseau, who would become a leading figure of the Romantic generation, and who attracted patronage from the highest levels of the Orléans regime.
A Hamlet in the Auvergne and the Romantic Landscape: Consistent with then-current classifications, Rousseau considered works such as
A Hamlet in the Auvergne to be studies (
études) rather than finished paintings (
tableaux). There is no painting corresponding to this study, but it—or a memory of the view itself—was the probable point of departure for a watercolor,
Auvergne Landscape (fig. 3). One of the great French landscape watercolors of the Romantic era, the view is broader than the one in the oil and the point of view has shifted up and to the left, resulting in a more poeticized image. The vaporous mist contributes to the effect, as do waterfalls cascading over the cliffs; their graphic qualities assume a pictorial role equal to what they portray. The sheet’s unusually elaborate medium (watercolor and pastel with gouache heightening, possibly with touches of gum arabic) and technique strongly suggest that it was not executed in an improvised setting out of doors—not entirely—but afterward, in the artist’s studio. Rousseau did not employ watercolor often, and the exceptional, even experimental nature of this work almost certainly echoes the personal impact of the initial experience as expressed in the oil.
Rousseau’s studies reflect a reorientation of man’s relationship to nature. The change began during the Enlightenment, when artists and others set out to experience nature firsthand as a means of gaining knowledge, and continued in the Romantic era, when they sought to translate this experience into correspondingly poetic works of art. This shift can be gauged by comparing
Hamlet in the Auvergne with the Louvre watercolor, and is alluded to in one of Rousseau’s often-quoted remarks: “The tree which rustles and the heather which grows are for me the grand history, that which will not change. If I speak well their language, I shall have spoken well the language of all times.”[7] Both pictures convey the epic scale of nature as Rousseau experienced it, but there are parallels in works by his Romantic peers. It is evident, for example, in Paul Huet’s views of Rouen in watercolor (fig. 4) and in oil (fig. 5), and also in Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps’s
paysage historique depicting
Marius Defeats the Cimbrians (fig. 6).[8]
A Hamlet in the Auvergne may have been included in the auction of fifty-five studies and finished paintings sold by the artist in 1850. More certain is that it was acquired, albeit at an unknown date, by the Norman marine painter Charles Mozin (1806–1862), whom Rousseau met in Rouen in the fall of 1831. The red wax seal of the Mozin estate sale is affixed to the stretcher (fig. 7).[9]
The Auvergne as a Destination for Artists: Rousseau’s decision to visit the Auvergne has often been regarded as unusual, but he was not the first artist to visit the region, nor the first to appreciate its wild aspect and rustic character. Michallon accompanied the L’Espine family to the spa town of Vichy in 1814. He may have stopped in the Auvergne again in 1817, on his way to Rome, where in 1818 he painted
Waterfall at Mont-Dore (The Met
1994.376). His friend Rémond was there about the same time. Even before he painted
Les sources de Royat (fig. 2), Rémond had exhibited the
Etude d’après nature à Royat (Puy-de-Dome) at the Salon of 1819 (whereabouts unknown), and in the same year he produced three views in and around Royat as lithographs.[10] At the Salon of 1822, Rémond showed
Carloman, Mortally Wounded in the Forest of Yvelines, which, despite its purported setting in the vicinity of Paris, clearly takes place in a landscape inspired by the Auvergne.[11] It is not known how often Rémond returned to the Auvergne, but he was there not long before Rousseau’s visit, in 1828, as attested by a study (whereabouts unknown).[12] Rémond exhibited an Auvergne subject again at the Salon in 1831.[13] He also put up for sale thirteen Auvergnat subjects in an auction of his studies that he organized in 1842.[14]
A large group of drawings produced by Étienne-Jean Delécluze on a tour of the Auvergne in 1821 suggests that he envisioned reproducing them as lithographs, as Rémond did.[15] This was the reason for Eugène Isabey’s sketching expedition to the Auvergne, undertaken at the behest of Baron Taylor and Charles Nodier for their epochal illustrated publication
Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l’ancienne France, issued in twenty-four volumes between 1820 and 1878. Isabey’s prints, produced between 1829 and 1831 and issued in 1833, typically show a village, church, or castle monumentalized within a mountainous setting, often by representing it from below (see, for example, The Met
22.85.8), and although Rousseau produced such views as well, there is nothing like
Hamlet in the Auvergne among Isabey’s compositions.[16]
Paul Huet visited the Auvergne in 1831. He and Rousseau undoubtedly compared notes on the region when they met in Rouen that fall. Perhaps Charles Mozin's interest in acquiring the present work originated in those conversations.[17]
Asher Miller 2020
[1] Alfred Sensier,
Souvenirs sur Théodore Rousseau (Paris, 1872), pp. 20–23.
[2] See Schulman 1999, nos. 24–81 (oils). Known drawings from the trip are fewer in number.
[3] The identification is credited to Thierry Normand in Kurlander 2014.
[4] This is among the two or three largest studies Rousseau produced in the Auvergne. Only Schulman no. 60, at 16 7/8 x 24 ¾ inches (43 x 63 cm), and no. 77, at 13 7/8 x 30 ¾ inches (35.3 x 52.7 cm), are comparable in size.
[5] “Ce voyage de six mois, 1830, est sa petite revolution.” Théophile Silvestre, “L'oeuvre posthume de Théodore Rousseau,”
Catalogue de la vente qui aura lieu suite du décès de Théodore Rousseau, sale catalogue, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, April 27–May 2, 1868, p. 8.
[6] “Rémond l’anathémisa et le voua aux dieux infernaux: ses paysages étaient l’oeuvre du délire . . . .” Sensier 1872, p. 23.
[7] Rousseau, as quoted by Charles Sprague Smith, in
Barbizon Days: Millet-Corot-Rousseau-Barye (New York, 1902), p. 132.
[8] The Huet watercolor (fig. 4) has also been attributed to Rousseau; see Michel Schulman with the collaboration of Marie Bataillès and Virginie Sérafino,
Théodore Rousseau, 1812–1867: Catalogue raisonné de l’œuvre graphique (Paris, 1997), p. 111, no. 89 (see also the prior entry, no. 88, devoted to Rousseau’s large topographical drawing of Rouen now in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, inv. 1953.211). Huet executed the oil (fig. 5) in 1831 and exhibited it to general acclaim at the Salon of 1833; he produced it following the destruction of a forty-foot long painting of Rouen he had made for the Diorama Montesquieu, Paris, in the fall of 1829, which Rousseau is likely to have seen. See Pierre Miquel, “Paul Huet,”
Le Paysage français au XIXe siècle, 1824–1874: L’École de la Nature (Maurs-la-Jolie, 1975), vol. 2, pp. 203–8. The Decamps (fig. 6) was exhibited at the Salon of 1834.
[9] Rousseau reportedly encountered Huet in Rouen in 1831 as well, perhaps not for the first time. See Miquel 1975, vol. 2, pp. 202, 204.
[10] See Suzanne Gutwirth, “Jean-Charles-Joseph Rémond (1795–1875), Premier Grand Prix de Rome du Paysage historique,”
Bulletin de la Société de l’Histoire de l’Art français, vol. 1981 (1983), p. 196, no. 9, and p. 217.
[11] Oil on canvas, 74 13/16 x 110 ¼ in. (190 x 280 cm); signed and dated (lower right): J. Rémond 1821; Musée du Louvre, Paris, INV 7409; see Gutwirth 1981, p. 196, no. 10, fig. 4.
[12]
View in the Auvergne, oil on paper, laid down on canvas, 21.5 x 31.5 cm; inscribed on label (on stretcher): Auvergne 1828; see
From Revolution to Empire, exh. cat., Hazlitt Gooden & Fox, London, 1978, p. 10, no. 26, pl. 35; Gutwirth 1981, p. 203, no. 49.
[13] See Gutwirth 1981, p. 204, no. 55, for the work exhibited in the Salon of 1831 as no. 1746, “Un moulin d’Auvergne,” with framed dimensions as 57 x 63 cm, which may be identical with
A Mill in the Auvergne, oil on paper, laid down on canvas, 13 ¾ x 20 in. (35 x 51 cm), whereabouts unknown; see sale, Christie’s, Paris, June 25, 2019, no. 68, bought in.
[14]
Vente d’études peintes en Italie, en France et en Suisse par Charles Rémond, sale catalogue, Hôtel des ventes, Paris, February 21–23, 1842, nos. 16–28.
[15] Delécluze,
Voyage en Auvergne, 1821, comprising an unpublished manuscript and seventy-two drawings in the Library of the Musée d'art Roger Quilliot, Clermont-Ferrand, 2010.9.1; see https://delecluze.msh.uca.fr/ (online resource consulted March 18, 2020). See also E. J. Delécluze,
Souvenirs de soixante années (Paris, 1862), pp. 137–43.
[16] See Atherton Curtis,
L’oeuvre lithographique de Eugène Isabey (Paris, 1939), unpaginated, nos. 29–45.
[17] Miquel 1975, vol. 2, p. 204.
