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Dimensions: 35 1/2 by 46 1/4 in.

90.17 by 117.5cm

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Provenance: The Artist's Studio; Sale, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, April 27-May 2, 1868, no. 48
Quincy Adams Shaw, Boston, from about 1870 until his death, 1908
Knoedler Gallery, New York

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Literature: Alfred Sensier, Souvenirs sur Th. Rousseau, Paris, 1872, pp. 270, 281-283
Amand-Durand and Alfred Sensier, Etudes et Croquis de TH. Rousseau, Paris, 1876, illustrated pl. 17
Michel Schulman, Théodore Rousseau: Catalogue raisonné de l'oeuvre peint, Paris, 1999, no. 603, illustrated p. 310

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Notes: In Soleil couchant sur les sables du Jean-de-Paris, Théodore Rousseau created his most magnificent celebration of the powerful sunsets that had so entranced him throughout his twenty years of wandering the byways of the Forest of Fontainebleau. For earlier paintings of the Forest or the nearby village of Barbizon, Rousseau had tamed his dramatic sunset skies with intervening screens of trees or softened his brilliant colors with rhyming tints in the foliage or reflections in sparkling puddles. But for Soleil couchant sur les sables du Jean-de-Paris, painted in a particularly concentrated burst of activity in 1864, Rousseau made the pervasive crimson glow of the sunset-into-twilight moment the specific subject of a major painting. Preparing the entire canvas with a wash of vermilion, he carefully subsumed all the characteristic hues of his much-loved lichens, blooming heathers, moss-laden rocks, and towering beech trees into a shimmering symphony of fiery air that seems drawn out of the earth itself.

Rousseau had pondered the composition of Soleil couchant sur les sables du Jean-de-Paris for several years: a black crayon drawing from 1858-60 establishes a slightly more square arrangement of the site (Schulman, L'Oeuvre graphique, no. 732) and a painted study on paper elaborates the rhythms of rocks and vegetation that animate the hillside (Schulman, L'Oeuvre peint, no. 602). But neither work even hints at the tour de force of color that defines the final painting. Alfred Sensier, friend and biographer of Rousseau, describes the artist's work on the painting, contrasting his focused, confident execution of Soleil couchant sur les sables du Jean-de-Paris with the often tormented scraping and repainting that characterized much of Rousseau's effort in the last years of his life.

The "Jean-de-Paris" was one of the many lieu-dits in the Forest of Fontainebleau, distinctive sections or landmarks commonly named for a grand old tree, an unusual rock formation, or an event long-lost in local myth. For Rousseau, the looming hillside, approached by broad, sandy dunes and crowned with a grove of mixed trees and immense boulders, was both a refuge for personal meditation and a source of endless visual challenge. Over his twenty years in Barbizon, he created more than a dozen paintings and finished drawings of the area, viewing the hillside from either of its principal approaches, or moving well into the sunlit clearing at its top.

Soleil couchant sur les sables du Jean-de-Paris has only been seen publicly once, at the sale of Rousseau's estate in 1868. Shortly thereafter, the painting was acquired by Quincy Adams Shaw, a wealthy Bostonian who had previously purchased several paintings and drawings directly from Rousseau himself. After Shaw's death, the painting was lost from view; the only visual record was the striking reproduction in the portfolio of facsimiles of Rousseau's work that was produced, following his death-bed request, by Sensier and the publisher Amand-Durand in 1876.

Théodore Rousseau was at the height of his powers in 1864 when he painted Soleil couchant sur les sables du Jean-de-Paris, an extraordinary twilight symphony that celebrates the distinctive colors and textures of one of the artist's favorite Forest of Fontainebleau sites. As a darkening sunset sky subsumes the greens, ochres, and blue-grays of a sandy hillside in a fleeting moment of crimson light, Soleil couchant sur les sables du Jean-de-Paris captures the ultimate moment in the battle between night and day. Lost from view for nearly a century, Soleil couchant sur les sables du Jean-de-Paris is a breath-taking reminder that Rousseau was consistently the most daring and the most inventive of the many artists drawn to landscape painting during the middle decades of the 19th-century. In his concurrent mastery of the often opposed skills of color harmonizing and personalized mark making -- whether with pen or paint-laden brush -- Rousseau created the language of the Impressionist revolution.