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Artist or Maker: Théodore Rousseau (French, 1812-1867)

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Provenance: Bought from the artist by Frédéric Hartmann, Paris, in 1852 or 1853, but not delivered until after the artist's death.
His sale, Paris, 18 rue de Courcelles (Hartmann's home), 7 May 1881, lot 16.
Madame Hartmann (bought-in or purchased on her behalf at the above sale).
Galerie Brame, Paris, bought 24 December 1907 (inv. no. 2020).
Bought from the above by Baillehache, 6 May 1909.
Vicomte de Curel, Paris.
His sale, Paris, Galerie Georges Petit, 3 May 1918, lot 16.
L. Tauber, Paris.
Thence by descent to Monsieur Baveret, Paris, 1945.
Private collection, Paris.
Bought from the above by the father of the present owner.
Private Collection, Portugal.

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Exhibited: Paris, Salon, 1859, no. 2637.
Paris, Louvre, Tableaux exposés au profit de l'oeuvre des orphelins d'Alsace Lorraine, 1885, no. 421 (as Forêt de Fontainebleau; la maison du garde).
Paris, Galerie George Petit, Cent chefs-d'oeuvre des écoles françaises et étrangères, Deuxième exposition, 1892, no. 128, lent by Mme Hartmann (as La maison du garde).
Fontainebleau, Palais de Fontainebleau, Peintres des forêts, 1938, no. 39.
Rio de Janeiro, Museu Nacional de Belas Artes, Exposição de pintura francesca, July 1940, no. 92 (Organized by the Association française d'action artistique, this exhibition travelled first to Buenos Aires and Montevideo, and then to the USA. See note below.)
Chicago, Art Institute, Masterpieces of French Art lent by the museums and collectors of France, 10 April - 20 May 1941, no. 140. This exhibition (also entitled The Paintings of France since the French Revolution) travelled to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and the National Gallery, Washington.
Washington, National Gallery, on extended loan from the French government, until 1 February 1945.

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Notes: In its scale, luminosity, and subject matter, Ferme dans les Landes stands at the pinnacle of landscape painting of the Barbizon school. Kept by the artist throughout his lifetime, the picture was reworked by Rousseau several times, exhibited by him at the Salon of 1859, before finally being touched up after his death by his great friend and fellow Barbizon painter, Jean-François Millet.

The subject of the present painting is drawn from a trip Rousseau made to the Landes region of South-West France in the summer of 1844. According to Sensier (op cit.), Rousseau saw the areas as an untouched "Eden", in which the humble activities of man are eclipsed by the permanence of nature -- a belief here expressed in the contrast between the small farmhouse and the huge oak trees which dominate the composition.

Amand-Durand (op. cit) described the present work in the following terms: "Composition drawn from nature, which Rousseau worked on for many years. At his death, the painting was still in his studio as an unfinished work. And yet to all it seemed like a picture which had been executed down to the last detail. This painting tormented him, as he felt that in its execution he was striving towards an ideal that he could not reach. It is drawn with superior self-awareness, with a scientific understanding of trees, of light and of the varying qualities of shade. It is one of his most carefully researched works. Sensier (op. cit, 1872) described it simply as "The highest expression of his art."

The extent to which the present composition exercised Rousseau's mind is further revealed by the existence of a full-scale pencil on canvas drawing of the same subject (fig. 1). Elaborately worked up from an on-the-spot pencil sketch, the drawing shows the same preoccupations with the correct renderings of light, shade and foliage as the painting. Only in the foreground detail is there any difference between the painted and drawn canvases.

Given that the present work expresses themes typical of the Barbizon artists -- the humble activities of man and a poetic appreciation of nature -- the painting's slow genesis at first seems extraordinary. However, seen in the light of Charles Baudelaire's description of Rousseau in the poet's review of the 1846 Salon, its reasons become more apparent:

"M. Rousseau is a landscapist of the North. His paintings exhale a quiet melancholy. He likes bluey landscapes, twilight, unusual and water-soaked sunsets, large shady areas through which you can feel the breeze, and the interplay of light and shade. His colour is magnificent, but not dazzling. His skies are beyond compare for their flaky softness. If one were to conjure up a few landscapes by Rubens or Rembrandt, mix in a few memories of English painting, and suppose that, dominating and regulating all of that, is a profound and serious love of nature, one could perhaps get an idea of the magic of his paintings. He puts in much of his soul, like Delacroix; he is a naturalist led remorselessly towards the ideal."

Thus an obsessive quest for perfection, for the precise rendition of light was rendered all the more acute by Rousseau's attempt to portray the colours of a southern landscape, characterised by bright light and hard skies, which were quite different to the more muted tones which he normally conveyed on canvas. This struggle has been extensively researched by Simon Kelly (op. cit.), who writes:

"Ferme dans les Landes was initially purchased for three thousand francs by Rousseau's patron, Frédéric Hartmann, in February 1852.
The canvas remained in Rousseau's studio in the 1850s, where it was seen and remembered by one of the artist's pupils of these years, Ludovic Letrône, who described it as giving the effect of light at three o'clock in the afternoon. By the spring of 1857, Millet expected the picture to be completed for the Salon of that year. Rousseau did not, however, finally submit the picture and continued to work on it throughout 1858. In response to Hartmann's concerns over the picture's slow progress, he wrote to reassure his patron on 7 September 1858, affirming his intention to produce forms so strong and precise that they might remain unaffected by capricious changes of light."

At the time of the 1859 Salon, Rousseau was in terrible debt, and Hartmann offered the artist the possibility of selling the then 'finished' painting to someone else, for a quick infusion of cash, provided that he delivered an equivalent. But Rousseau would not part with it other than to Hartmann -- a sign of the artist's own affection and respect for this painting and his patron.

Rousseau commented that Ferme dans les Landes had bittersweet connotations for him since it was not only the product of his innermost conviction and initial 'impression' but also demonstrated the distance of his slow and earnest production from the rapid and flippant work of his contemporaries: 'this work is for me the object of serious thought and bittersweet study: sweet in so far that it originates from the most harmonious accord of my faculties, and leads me logically on the strength only of a first impression to a full realization of form; bitter in that it is out of step with the speed of execution that characterises our time, and the flippant judgements that people make of works of art, and also because I ask myself for whom would I make such pictures without feeling a sense that my efforts were wasted on any collector.'"

Rousseau's premonitions were largely correct, and the painting received a mixed reception when it was finally exhibited in 1859. Indeed some critics rounded on the very qualities that Rousseau so prized in his painting, focusing on his meticulous touch and comparing it unfavourably with his more spontaneous and younger contemporaries.

A combination of this criticism and his own obsessive nature led Rousseau to return to the work in the 1860s, "labouring especially hard over it during the autumn of 1863. Sequestered in his studio and working in even, shuttered light, he obsessively revised the painting's tonal values. Sensier saw the the development of this and other works as a 'tragédie aérienne', as Rousseau's work shifted ceaselessly between a sense of over-worked gloominess on one day and a reborn luminosity on another." (Kelly, op. cit.).

The more recent history of the painting, only now fully established, is equally noteworthy. Included with a group late 18th and 19th pictures assembled by René Huyghe, curator of paintings at the Louvre, it was sent in the summer of 1939 from Paris to Argentina for a tour of South America. Organized under the auspices of the Association française d'action artistique, the exhibition was designed as a gesture of goodwill by the Daladier government. The full wartime history of the paintings is described by the National Gallery, Washington, as follows:

"The paintings came from the Louvre, 19 small French museums, and several private collections. Because war conditions made it dangerous to ship the works back to France, they were brought to the United States by permission from the Vichy government. A section, The Painting of France Since the French Revolution, was shown in San Francisco, Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles before coming to the National Gallery.

Six months before Pearl Harbor storage space had been arranged at Biltmore in North Carolina to shelter the Gallery's most important paintings and sculpture from air raids. After the works departed in February 1942, space was available in galleries on the Main Floor to exhibit the French government loans in the custody of the Gallery during the war.

The Gallery relinquished custody of the loans to the Ambassador of the Provisional Government of the French Republic on February 1, 1945, although a number of the paintings continued to be housed and exhibited in the National Gallery until January 1946. A final exhibition of the French works was held in the Central Gallery beginning December 23, 1945." (www.nga.gov/past/)

L. Tauber, the wartime owner of the pictures and a noted collector, died of natural causes before the pictures were returned to France. The present painting was therefore restituted to his heir, Monsieur Baveret, who is recorded in Pierre Miquel's archives as living in the Hotel Raphaël, Paris.

We would like to thank Stephen Lockwood of the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, Sylvie Brame, and Alexandra Murphy for their assistance in researching the provenance of the present painting.

This painting is included in the Pierre Miquel archives held at Brame & Lorenceau, Paris.