Art and Ecology in Nineteenth-Century France: The Landscapes of Theodore Rousseau.
The Art Bulletin › Vol. 85 Nbr. 1, March 2003
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Art and Ecology in Nineteenth-Century France: The Landscapes of Theodore Rousseau.
GREG M. THOMAS
Art and Ecology in Nineteenth-Century France: The Landscapes of Theodore Rousseau Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. 285 pp.; 91 b/w ills. $62.50 When a painter takes his easel, his paints, and his homemade lean-to and wanders through the countryside choosing a spot, what is he doing? Is he following some preconditioning that will lead him to select (or to assemble from scattered elements) a soothing pastoral scene or rugged, wild terrain? Are the forces propelling him personal, historical, cultural, social? How, in other words, are we to understand landscape painting in general and in the middle of the 19th century in particular? The difficulty, Greg Thomas contends, is that we have been taught to treat the latter as a stage in the development of realism--or its more free-spirited companion, naturalism--with plein-air painting taking a pivotal role. Artists had long sketched out-of-doors, but the oil canvases they produced were composed in their studios. The midcentury innovation, it is commonly accepted, was that nature would now be captured more immediately (even if sketching and reworking were still practiced), and hence more truthfully. (1) The plein-air movement or new painterly techniques therefore receive scant attention from Thomas. Rather, he focuses on the intentions of the Barbizon school and, more specifically, what motivated Theodore Rousseau...See the full content of this document
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