Barbizon was an epicenter of artistic activity, becoming synonymous with landscape painting by mid-century, with Rousseau as its unofficial leader. He kept a second studio there for the rest of his life. Beginning in 1836, following a particularly bitter rejection by the Salon jury, Rousseau made ever more lengthy visits there, and, in 1847, he rented a cottage in the village of Barbizon. By 1828 or 1829, Rousseau had visited the Forest of Fontainebleau, some thirty miles south of Paris, then growing in appeal as a destination for landscape painters because of its varied terrain, groves of immense ancient oak trees, and proximity to the capital. Some of his earliest known drawings date to 1825, when he spent several months in his father’s native Franche-Comté, a rural region of eastern France (most often associated with the painter Gustave Courbet, who was born there in 1819). From boyhood he sketched in the surrounding country and nearby parks. Rousseau maintained a studio in Paris throughout his life. Apart from the older Scheffer, his two closest companions during this first phase of his career were fellow landscape painter Jules Dupré (1811–1889) and socialist art critic Théophile Thoré (1807–1869). By the mid-1840s, Rousseau was known popularly as le grand refusé. Frustrated, Rousseau ceased to participate in the Salon after 1841, resuming only in 1849, after the Revolution of 1848 introduced sweeping changes to the make-up of the jury. After that date, however, and despite royal patronage of Rousseau, the Salon jury was arbitrary in its judgment of his pictures. (For a characteristic example of the former mode by Jean-Victor Bertin, see The Met 2003.42.3.) In 1831, Rousseau’s first submission to the official state-sponsored exhibition held annually in Paris, known as the Salon, was accepted. He was alternately hailed and reviled for an aesthetic that avoided the idiom of classicizing idealization in favor of a more direct naturalism. Rousseau’s preference in art was for seventeenth-century Dutch landscapes and recent British painters, notably John Constable, but his work was directly inspired by his travels through the French countryside. The latter’s regime, known as the July Monarchy, came into power following the Revolution of 1830, the very subject commemorated by Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People. He was soon embraced by the better established painter Ary Scheffer (1795–1858), who displayed the unknown artist’s works in his studio and introduced him to his circle of artists and patrons, including Ferdinand-Philippe, Duc d’Orléans (1810–1842), eldest son of King Louis-Philippe (r. The experience had a liberating effect on the eighteen-year-old painter, who effectively declared independence from the academic strictures of his artistic education. The critic Paul Mantz (1821–1895) wrote of Rousseau in 1867 that “He is Europe’s leading landscapist, and, because of this, landscape, which was formerly considered a secondary genre, is ranked on a par with history painting.” In 1830, Rousseau undertook an extended sketching expedition to the Auvergne region of central France. Also characteristic are the paintings of Théodore Rousseau, who, parallel to Camille Corot (1796–1875), played a crucial role in the elevation of landscape subjects as an independent genre of painting in the decades before Impressionism. Equally representative are the trenchant pictures of modern urban life seen in caricatures by Honoré Daumier (1808–1879) that appeared in the Parisian daily press. Its emblem is Liberty Leading the People, a battle scene painted in 1830 by Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) and now in the Musée du Louvre, Paris. From Romanticism to Barbizon-Rousseau in his Time: For much of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, the term “Men of 1830” resonated with enthusiasts of modern art by linking the democratic spirit that fueled the final overthrow of the Bourbon monarchy with the Romantic movement in France and subsequent waves of artistic innovation.
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