Courbet, The Angry Sea

Courbet's role in generating an accelerated momentum in the overall practice of landscape painting in the years between 1847 and 186o has often been blurred by the more publicly affective character of his accomplishments as a figure painter. By 1855 Courbet had already produced most of the large-scale figure paintings for which he is best known -the After Dinner at Omans (Lilk Musee des Beaux-Arts), The Stonebreakers and The Burial at Omans - as well as a considerable ·number of variously programmed self-portraits. It is these figural paintings with their unexpected featuring of common people, natives of Courbet's hometown, Ornans (in east central France near the Swiss border), that generated the notion that Courbet's was a new kind of art, describable as Realist rather than just naturalist in the prevailing "based on nature mode" of other figure or landscape painters. Courbet's art was real in its specificity of choice of subjects - ordinary subjects familiar and important to him- and in its highly original modes of representing them. Traditionally eloquent arrangements of figures were rejected for - ordinary arrangements. The ways in which Courbet chose to evoke them pictorially involved equally novel technical procedures. His paint surfaces were built up with virtually any implement he could get his hands on - brushes of all sizes, the palette knife and all manner of things that could deposit or scrape pigmented oil. The constructive activity of Courbet's painted surfaces is as demonstrably real in its emphatic handmade quality as are his subjects.

Technique is the primary content of a technical exercise. Does the writer suggest that such things are worth viewing ? I’ve never seen a Courbet that did not have way more - but appatently this writer feels differently.

As a counter assertion, I would suggest that a painting fails to deliver important content as soon as technique is noticed by the viewer, A "secondary subject" is a distraction from what really matters.

Technique might become the primary content when it's still unfamiliar — but how long can an innovation remain surprising ?

How far would you travel to see the very first oil painting or watercolor ? - unless you suspected something else about it was worth viewing.

Courbet, Valley of Ornans, 1858

I wonder which of these might be more remarkable for technical issues rather than visual effect?

Fox in the Snow, 1860

Traditionally eloquent arrangements of figures were rejected for ordinary arrangements. The ways in which Courbet chose to evoke them pictorially involved equally novel technical procedures. His paint surfaces were built up with virtually any implement he could get his hands on - brushes of all sizes, the palette knife, and all manner of things that could deposit or scrape pigmented oil. The constructive activity of Courbet's painted surfaces is as demonstrably real in its emphatic handmade quality as are his subjects. Not since Constable's work had anything like the variegated paint construction of Courbet appeared in France. And even while reminding the spectator of Constable, if of anyone, the actual message of Courbet's surfaces - how they function, what they mean - is ultimately unique. Both Constable and Courbet improvise their paint construction variously in different pictures, but what guides the improvisatory activity is not the same. Constable's hands respond to seeing; Courbet's, to seeing and touching simultaneously. Because this is so, Courbet's surfaces are sensuously more complex. Feelings of seeing and touching combine in them to produce virtually limitless combinations of passive representation and active abstract crafting. So open are the processes of Courbet's paint construction that those processes themselves become a kind of second subject in his pictures, and the remarkable effect of this is the highly radical and influential demonstration that content may be made in painting to reside (as it does in pure music) in technique alone. Nowhere does the demonstration of technique functioning as content in Courbet's art emerge more clearly than in his landscapes, but the production of landscape was part of a larger art- political agenda which requires some discussion. For the works produced between 1847 and 1857, Courbet concentrated on the area near his home- town, painting typically interesting hill, valley, and river views common to the area. Remaining close to his rural heritage was an important polemical maneuver (related to that followed in his figure paintings) undertaken to establish both aesthetic and socio-political distinctness in his artistic practice. Although comparatively wealthy rural bourgeoisie in terms of his family background, it was important for Courbet in terms of his evolving Realist program to emphasize the rural and suppress the bourgeois about himself. In the years around the revolution of 1848, radical politics required an anti-bourgeois posturing in Paris and other major urban centers all over Europe. Courbet's provincial manners needed only a bit of exaggeration to make him move more easily into what were eventually professionally useful activities of a politically radical sort. Wagner, who tried the same political game in Dresden during the same period, was less fortunate, ending up a fugitive from the law and a fifteen-year refugee from German territory. Courbet, on the other hand, successfully manipulated his radical politics to become an aesthetic hero in France. He used his political included in the present exhibition, the 1858 Valley of Ornans is a superb summary example of Courbet's first, locally focused, landscape imaging mode. It displays an enormous range of constructive paint markings and a highly unconventional division of color zones between the dark foreground and the complex topographical and architectural motif of the middleground and background. Both areas are more flatly and intensely dark or light than anything imaged by members of the Corot- Rousseau-Daubigny circle. There is no imposed atmospheric unification of tone or color value. Instead, Courbet's paint deposit is allowed to exert very openly both its descriptive and its abstractly tactile intensity. By mid-career, Courbet seems to have needed frequent changes of location for his landscape work in order to continue to discover new challenges for his increasingly self-expressive technique. Beginning in the late 1850s, seascapes provide such challenges. Courbet was not natively familiar with the sea, and whether viewing it in Normandy or in the South of France, he always managed to find textures and colors of productively unanticipated varieties.

Courbet, Angry Sea, 1869-70

At times, as in The Angry Sea of c. 1869, the sheer weight of raging surf combined with the almost palpably heavy sky and the spray of salt water produce overtly dramatic contrasts within the paint and color structure.

“The sea! The sea! . . . in her fury which growls, she reminds me of a caged monster who can devour me.” .... Courbet in a letter to Victor Hugo, 1864

The writer shares the above quote which verbalizes what I feel from the image. Apparently, they prefer the "beauty" found in Corot.

But the earthy power in Courbet’s work - and whatever philosophy of nature it may provoke - deserves much more attention than the techniques he used to express it. He was ground-breaking in more ways than one. Who is his equal in this regard? The swirling storms of Turner, the intense horizontals of Rousseau - and then what? I can’t think if any other icons of art history - but that might just be because observational landscape painting was no longer included in Modernist narratives. You have to find them for yourself - major art museums will not do the vetting for you.

Albert Handel, Lakeway Grotto 2

A contemporary vision that seems to echo both Courbet and Monet.

Courbet, Seacoast 1854 (Souvenir of Les Cabanes)

At other times, as in Sea- coast (Souvenir of Les Cabanes) from a decade earlier, the natural coloristic and textural variety of coastal topography and vegetation combine to encourage a highly flexible, exploratory, Constable-like form of technical devisings.

Courbet, Valley of the Loue, 1865

Courbet, Cliffs at Etretat, 1869

The Valley of the Loue from the mid-1860s and A Bay with Cliffs from c. 1869 are painted by a more "relaxed" Courbet, content to let his hands build ingratiatingly toned and touched surfaces in response to his obviously enjoying eye.

Source of the Loue, 1864

The most powerful of Courbet's landscapes from this period, and the most idiosyncratic in terms of motif, are the four versions of The Source of the Loue from c. 1864. The version from Buffalo, which is included in the present exhibition, is perhaps the most barren and confrontational of all. Represented is the rough, rocky "hole in the earth" from which the river proceeds. The contrast of rock and water is, in terms of depicted substance, virtually absolute, and only the magical responsiveness of Courbet's paint marks and palette manages to weld the content into a continuously live organism of picturing. Spectators are forced to follow with their eyes (and fictively with the hands as well), the uniformly rugged working of Courbet's painted surface as it creates a feeling of unity, when in the motif there is only opposition.

Source of the Loue, 1863-4 (Met Museum)

Courbet : self portrait , The Violincellist, 1842

One figure painting by Courbet is included in the present exhibition, sitting in, so to speak, for The Studio, which is too large to travel. Produced in 1847 as one of two versions of the same subject, Self-Portrait: The Violincellist proclaims the relationship, as Courbet saw it, between the making of music and the making of paintings.' The image is developed in the rather conservative Rembrandt-like mode of many of Courbet's early figural works, so it is in no sense remarkable from the point of view of style

The writer goes on to note that this piece is "the subject embedded in the style"

The upper-class cello, apparently "made of rubber", is being awkwardly played in the lap like a lower-class guitar. Courbet the revolutionary!

Courbet, Mere Gregoire, 1855, 57,59

This painting in Chicago has a similar relationship between the head and hands.

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DAUBIGNY

(1817-1878)

By the mid-1850s Daubigny produces strong and original work. Several masterpieces were produced from the area around Optevoz some that are strictly landscapes and others that portray complex "peasant" architectural motif.

Water’s edge, Optevoz, 1856

The former paintings, such as The Water's Edge. Optevoz, demonstrate a clear debt to Courbet in the physical force of their paint construction and in the confident (and largely instinctive) deployment of complex intervals of color. The latter have a material weightiness of both motif and paint structure that gives them a kind of physical hyper-presence analogous to that felt in Courbet's figure paintings. But overall it is — even at this point in his career —- Corot who seems to inspire Daubigny most significantly, particularly in matters of painted tonality. There is always an organizing tone - a particular value of a particular hue of gray or green (at times blue) that serves as a reference for all the colors in a given picture. Hues tend to be close (gray blue, green with minimums of yellow or rose additions. Depending on the motif (and the depicted time of day), light and dark oppositions may or may not intrude as relatively simple vistas of space are opened.

The writer offered an example for a Courbet-like painting -

but I’m totally lost without examples for

an "organizing tone". I have no idea to what that refers.

More than any other maior artist in the century (including Constable), Daubigny relied on working in nature and from nature for the development of his effects. He quite likely brought his paintings nearer to finished condition In the out-of-doors than did many other artists (Monet, for example) who made more public clatter about the practice. Daubigny used a studio boat for the development of his innumerable views of moments and places on his beloved Oise River in the 186os. These paintings, of which there are several superb examples in the present exhibition, seem to represent wholeheartedly nature-based imaging.

Since so many images include houses, roads, or fields, I would prefer to call it place-based imaging.

Also —- the subject seems to be a you-are-there experience —— rather than a here-it-is.

There no notable, special technique here —- it’s just an effect that the artist has chosen to work towards.

I find it more in Sisley than Monet.

Perhaps this feeling of immersion is what this book calls "melomania"

There is nothing theatrical in Daubigny and the best of his work is a kind of seamless achievement of the sort Monet would rephrase (no doubt remembering Daubigny) later on in his series paintings of the 1890s. In fact, Monet's series work has its most singular precedent in Daubigny and in the works of Daubigny from the 1860s which he "grew up on." Both in paintings and in suites of etchings, Daubigny moved softly from image to related image, making the most of small changes of position or of natural movement. The tendency for Daubigny's work to disclose its character slowly and sequentially and within rather narrow motific limits is indicative of his melomania, as is a somewhat similar phenomenon in Corot's works in the late 1850s and 1860s. For both artists, musical-spectating time frames as well as theme and variation practices became almost a procedural rule. Like Schumann's piano suites, which became increas- ingly popular in France in this period, Daubigny's successive images change their mood (some- times softly, sometimes abruptly) while holding to fairly constant motific materials. Mastery of technique is everything. That is where variety and richness of effect finally reside. One can hardly imagine an engrossing subject in Daubigny's mature work, but one easily finds exceptionally refined effects - arguably quite musical ones. Daubigny would on occasion stretch his material in the direction of the work of the younger Impressionist artists.

Edme-Francois Daubigny

Charles- Francois Daubigny was born into a family of artists -

and his first instructor was his father, Edme.

This piece might exemplify the "theatricality" that is absent in the work of his son.

Francois Marius Granet

Charles-Francois also studied with Granet -

who only painted landscape as necessary for an historical scene.

Could not be more theatrical—the landscape is just furniture on a stage.

Daubigny, Fields in the Month of June, 1874

Monet, Poppy Field, 1873

His Fields in the Month of June comes from the same year as the first Impressionist group exhibition. Its sprinkling of red poppies and the comparatively strong color passages in the sky are a gesture toward the more hue-contrast dominant tastes of the brash, "noisy" Impressionists, but the gesture, in spite of the substantial physical scale of the painting, remains in the end a polite rather than enthusiastic one.

This is the the second time we’ve compared these two paintings while studying this book. It does appear that Daubigny had seen and loved the Monet. The painting that ensued is disappointing. Bright, happy fields of flowers just don’t work for his phlegmatic temperament. But it's good to see him trying something new.

Daubigny, Crossroads at the Eagles Nest,1844

Daubigny, Sluice in the Optevoz Valley, 1854

Daubigny, Hamlet of Optevoz, 1854

Mill at Optevoz, 1857

Evening on the Oise, 1863

Morning, 1863

Morning on the Oise, 1866

French Coast Scene, 1868

Banks of the Oise, Auvers , 1874

Since this exhibition catalog covers a period in French painting, it’s appropriate for the catalog essay to compare Daubigny to the other painters in the show.

Comparing the earliest (1844 ) and latest (1874) Daubigny pieces in this exhibit, I’ve gotten more curious about how the artist changed over the decades. His "Fields in the month of June" appears to salute his up and coming colleague, Monet. But his "Banks of the Oise" feels more like a, calm, aged, and weathered version of his earlier work.

Pond at Gylieu, 1853. (Not in this exhibit)

Here’s another earlier piece - it was bought by the emperor and elevated the artist’s career.

I feel youthful idealism.

Cascade at Mahoura, 1872 (not in this exhibit)

Here’s another later piece that shows a less friendly.

Somewhat like Courbet,- but more about the swooning feeling of the viewer than the forces of nature.

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DIAZ DE LA PEÑA

UNLIKE ROUSSEAU, Diaz experienced routine success from an early point, both at the Salon and in the private gallery market with landscape paintings of subjects more or less specifically derived from the Forestof Fontainebleau. In retrospect it is compara-tively simple to see why Diaz achieved such broad popularity while Rousseau was considere "difficult." The latter was a totally uncompromising painter. His images make no obviousconcessions, either in terms of subject matter or in technique, to established public taste. Fromthe mid-18305 onward, Rousseau pursued themost tragic and psychologically ambiguous of landscape sensations, rarely giving his viewers anything reassuring to hold onto. Rousseau felt loneliness and vastness in the forest. Nature for him was a live complex of monumental geological and botanical forces which were never gentle and often alienating to the helpless human presence witnessing those forces. Everything in Rousseau is in some fashion larger than life, sublime, and ultimately incomprehensible in everyday terms or in everyday fantasy.

Although Diaz was Rousseau's lifelong artistic associate, he was never as personally close to him as Millet was. And despite their association, which began as early as 1837, Diaz seems never to have been inclined to see landscape, even the same landscape, in Rousseau's way. He felt nothing of Rousseau's awe. Instead, the Fontainebleau landscape, as he depicts it, is interesting and inviting. Correspondingly, it is painted as it is seen - gently, often with a luscious softness of touch, and with an ingratiating movement of tone from lights to darks. Often the landscape space opens hospitably to specific human action, becoming the context for the pleasures- of the hunt or the wanderings of bands of brightly clad gypsies. There are at times surprisingly of both landscape or figural sorts in Diaz's works, but the surprises are never threatening. The spectator can approach a Diaz without fear and with the knowledge that there will be much that is conventionally pleasant to be seen and to be felt.

But there is more to Diaz than just a "soft"Rousseau, and it is probably wrong to suggest that he shamelessly catered in a conscious fashion to his bourgeois audience. It is more accurate to see Diaz as himself, naturally bourgeois in his taste and feelings. There is too much imaging conviction, too much flexibility of technique operative in his work, to see it driven by any but authentic feelings. That those feelings may not have been of the elevated van of Rousseau's (or Beethoven's) is not to prove them ungenuine. Like any artist of integrity, Diaz painted from himself and for himself. It was his contemporary good fortune that his feelings regarding nature were in every important respect identical to those of the audience which would see and buy his works. Diaz's loss of stature in the present century results from the fact that the viewing audience and many of its feelings have changed considerably. The range of Diaz's painting at its best can be seen in two of the works included in the present exhibition: The Stag Hunt of 1846 and Early Autumn: Forest of Fontainebleau from 1870. Except for the greater technical finesse of the later work, the two paintings are not so different as to suggest major modifications of aesthetic premises. The Stag Hunt fills a Rousseau-like open foregroundwith the complex actions of the hunt, while secondary figures are stationed at various positions in the equally Rousseau-like forest background. Everything in the image space is comfortably measured by the presence of figures. The trees and the forest floor seem to contain the figures in a generously accommodating way. The later work, Early Autumn, which is not so dependent on the human figure per se, nevertheless positions its topographical details and handles its light and surface construction so as to appear enterable rather than mysterious. The forest, inhabited or uninhabited, remains a pleasant place and a nominally beautiful one.

Stag Hunt, 1846

Forest Scene, 1850-60

Wood Interior, 1867

Early Autumn, Forest of Fontainebleu, 1870

Path Near the Pond of Vipers, Fontainebleu, 1860's

The text copied above feels quite reasonable - but Diaz’s paintings have always felt so much different to me. I grew up with the last piece since it’s at the Taft Museum in Cincinnati - though all I can remember is that I never liked it. Too dark and creepy - not the "pleasant place" quoted above.

Today, looking at these reproductions, I still feel that way — though now I would attribute that effect to the artist’s hard childhood. The brief bio in the notes says he was orphaned and raised by a clergyman. His attitude toward nature seems to echo the dark and tangled wood in which Dante gets lost in the first chapter of the Inferno. Nature is outside of God’s grace - and it didn’t help that Diaz lost a leg to snakebite as a youth.

Rousseau’s nature feels wild - Diaz creates a world that also feels sinister - like a setting for "Wuthering Heights". In many of these images, Darkness is encroaching from all sides. I have no idea why he sold so well - but that period also had a taste for the Gothic novel. So do I - but I would not want a window into that world up on my wall.

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JULES DUPRE

SEEN IN THE CONTEXT of his most tormida-ble contemporaries, Corot, Rousseau, and

Courbet, Dupré's work appears anachronistIc. is painting seems to resist - almost in principle - being a part of the nineteenth century. Much of his work honors seventeenth-centurv Dutch examples or the residue of such in the work of Georges Michel. This is not to say that Dupré was unattected by his contemporaries Such was not possible. Rather it is to suggest that Dupré, for whatever reasons, undertook to stress continuities between historical and modern landscape painting, rather than differences. For this he was rewarded with considerable contemporary market success but ultimatelv was rejected as a serious artist-friend by the wayward Théodore Rousseau. Trained like many other artists of his generation as a porcelain painter, Dupré was comprehensively aware of a wide range of historical imaging practices. In landscape this meant seventeenth-century Holland in particular. Even though his work would respond in various ways to Rousseau's, Constable's, and Trovon's at different points in his career, Dupré would remain an eclectic artist with very particular, and ultimately very limited, taste. He would never stretch the sensibility of his audience with imaging difficulties. Instead he would reassure that audience that everything (with regard to landscape practice) was comparatively normal Needless to say, Dupré needed a high degree of learned technical sophistication to carry out his arch-conservative role among the artists of his generation. He possessed this from an earlv point, and because he possessed it, he was able to feign a kind of naive freshness almost as a matter of routine. Unlike any other artist of note in his immediate circle, Dupré conceals his technical prowess. Whether he does so emulating a kind of composite of Diaz and Troyon in the Lehman Collection's Cows in a Field or Michel in Cleveland's Windmill, it is always clear that Dupré is technically holding back to appear more original. Later in his career, he is more straightforward. His Pastoral Scene of 1870 is a splendid seventeenth-century Dutch para-phrase, more than worthy of the equally expert technician Troyon. What is missing in Dupré at virtually every point in his work is original feeling. He is the true academician of mid-century landscape

Landscape with Cattle at Limousin, 1837

Bright Day. 1835-40

Pastoral Scene, 1870

Windmill, late 1850's

Marshland, 1860's, 1870's

An essay published online by the National Gallery characterizes Dupre as a stylist - which is a less loaded word than academician - even if his official Academy honors are offered as one cause of his break with Rousseau. He aims at grandiosity - not intimacy - but his style feels too recognizably distinct to say that "What is missing in Dupré at virtually every point in his work is original feeling"

As seen in a detail from a later painting, shown above, his expression was quite painterly. He is said to have been impressed by Constable -- perhaps he admired Turner as well.

He does seem quite apart from all the painters we have discussed so far. He's not building a quiet, meditative retreat like Corot and Daubigny and he doesn't see the natural world as wild as Rousseau, Courbet, and Diaz do. Like the dutch landscape painters of the 17th Century. his natural world seems to present the glory of the divine.

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PAUL HUET

Chateau at Pierrefonds in Ruins, 1868

HUET'S MAGNIFICENT The Château Pierretonds in Ruins, the single example of his work in this exhibition. arguably his masterpiece. Confidently large in its Salon scale this painting summarizes the character and the extent of Constables direct legacy in France. And, even more to the point, it does so in the late 1860s when the example was newly interesting. Echoes of Huet's work appear in various forms in the contemporary efforts of both Daubigny and Pissarro.

This assertion badly needs examples!

Despite an academic figural background, Huet was drawn to landscape painting even betore 1820. Working routinely in Normandy, absorbed several waves of influences from a variety of British artists - many of whom were Constable's contemporaries and working in watercolor, were collectively obsessed with a kind of daylight brightness, otten opposed to and emphasized by somewhat strong renderings of shadow. Like his friend Isabev, Huet responded rapidly and enthusiasticallv to Constable's oil paintings when significant numbers appeared in Paris in the 1820s. The intricacv of Constable's palette steps and the seeminglv limitless breadth of his technical invention (dedicated to specifying every grade of light-struck tint and texture) left a lasting impression on both artists the same time, the equally British taste for the historically picturesque absorbed them; both Huet and Isabey worked productively for many decades with motits developed in the continuously popular "picturesque voyage" found most commonly in widelv distributed albums of lithographs and in upscale illustrated magazines in France through the 1860s.

The Château at Pierretonas represents the brilliant late blossom of the Constable-informed but picturesque mode of French landscape imaging the subject, presented as though in a moment or impressive contemporary time, in fact represents a fiction since the ruins were already in the process of restoration by the architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc after the mid-1850s. The Huet view is one of nostalgia for those his historical monuments revealing in their ruin the texture or past centuries and their gradual slippage back into nature Being a romantic in the simplest, yet most protound sense, Huet uses the complex devices of a "scientific manner of imaging to heighten the artective plausibility of his motif. Ode makes the remembered for the desired come once again to life, with his ruins made to seem pastorally embedded in an excited complex of light and atmosphere. Major contrasts of zones of light and shadow alternate with minor accents of color to bring the Image back to life in the spectator's imagination. the science of Constable (at least the Constable of the 182os) has been neglected in favor of the conjuring potential of his technique, but for hisFrench contemporaries that was the most durable aspect of his legacy.

Isn’t this painting way too Romantic to belong in this exhibit? A woman appears to flee in terror from the ruined castle as it’s hill is bathed in eerie light beneath the storm clouds. (BTW - the reproduction printed in the catalog is a reverse mirror image of what the catalog of the chateaux museum shows on its website)

As that catalog puts it;

With its tormented tone and vigorous craftsmanship, this canvas proclaims its romanticism at a time when this sensibility was somewhat out of fashion.

The wind that bends the two frail trees in the foreground blows in a direction opposite to that which swells the woman's headscarf running for shelter.

1853

Huey’s other pieces on the internet are much closer to Constable,

Rousseau, and other plein air painters.

Here’s the companion piece to the Ruins —- the chateaux as restored by Viollet-le-Duc.

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EUGENE ISABEY

A Norman Fishing Village, 1831

Boat Dashing Against a Jetty, 1850’s

BY VIRTUE OF having actually visited England in 1825, besides working in the ambience of many British watercolorists in Normandy during the 18205 (and after), Isabey served as the firmest conduit joining advanced landscape practice on both sides of theChannel. It is a function that he carried out

(along with Huet) for half a century. By definitions that would link progressive developments exclusively with English sources in this period, Isabey must by necessity be termed the most progressive Frenchman. Indeed, his reputation at the Salon and elsewhere (even among the young painters of the 1850s) was formidable.

I wonder what French or a English words were used in mid-century Paris that would be synonymous with "progressive". I do get the feeling, especially from Courbet’s antics, that it was important for an artist to be considered new and better - just like today.

His market was international, largely, one suspects, because his work displayed so perfectlv

the essence of the taste for the "picturesque voyage" that was created and sustained by an enormous number of albums of lithographic views of rustic/ historical sites in France that were produced from 1825 through the 1860s Isabey was himself one of the best of the many lithographers engaged in such publishing projects, and certainly the best after the death of his English friend and rival, Richard Parkes Bonington. As a painter, Isabey followed Constable's lead carefully, at least for a time. In works like his Norman Fishing Village of c. 1831, there is as clear an emulation of the complex crispness of Constable's handling of light via high-keyed color (with many accents of pure white) contrasted with the absence of light in dense romantic passages of shadow, as any French painter would ever produce. Théodore Rousseau, along with many other landscape painters in France in the 1830s, would be keenly impressed by the early interpretations of Constable that Isabey effortlessly provided, while delivering the example in appropriately picturesque French form around distinctly French motifs.

For many decades Isabey was the artist in residence on the Normandy coast where he painted (not necessarily from nature per se) many of the sites and locations later favored by Jongkind, Boudin, and finally Monet. However, as the years passed and as his reputation expanded, Isabey gradually elaborated the theatrical character of his landscape practice, making it (for want of a better term) somewhat performative even operatic. His subjects were intended ascrowd-pleasers of a fairly predictable sort, rang-ing from quaint village seascapes with much interesting generic figural activity to exciting, if not unduly sublime or terrifying, sea pieces. His c. 1850 Boat Dashing against a Jetty is typical of his mid-career work. It is all activity and spectacle delivered through drawing, paint handling, and coloring that are quite self-conscious in their agitated virtuosity. Before long, Monet would react negatively to works like these - even good ones like the Jetty picture - seeing them as "terrible machines," but there was in his hostile reaction a certain undercurrent of envy (one suspects) for the publicly affective force of Isabev's achievement. Jongkind was sufficiently impressed by Isabey in the early 1850s to have journeyed from Holland to study under his direction; he became Isabey's student as conscientiously as any of those painters who began at about the same time to cluster around Corot. Virtuoso technical practices, long divorced from sources in Constable, combined with locally colorful genre subjects, became basic to Jongkind's early work. The sources in Isabey are as clear as is the forward passage of them from Jongkind

Bonington, 1824

Isabey, 1833

Here’s a few of the lithographs that were so popular in that period.

I suppose the word for them is ‘spectacle’ — i.e. something to entertain the eye.

‘Picturesque’ is also a good term.

Fecundity of detail seems important.

Did Monet really call them "terrible machines"?

So would I.., though "terrible" is hyperbole.

I also agree with the term "performative" and "operatic"

Isabey should have been a set designer.

Bonington

Yet here’s a watercolor Bonington did in his brief career.

Magnificent!

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CHARLES EMILE JACQUE

Landscape with Sheep

BESIDES BEING AN accomplished painter, Jacque is perhaps even better known as a prolific etcher and illustrator. In fact his early training was devoted to printmaking and cartography. The graphic skill which Jacque possessed served him well as he moved into the practice of landscape in the late 1840s. Millet was his primary model, and Jacque's tendency to feature shepherds and sheep in the half-pasture, half-forest images that carry his reputation owes much to Millet's example. But Rousseau and Diaz seem to have impressed Jacque as well. The former's dry, somewhat impersonal rendering of foliage and the latter's more sensuous paintetly finesse combine in various ways to form the characteristic Jacque rendering of landscape. Never an ambitious colorist, Jacque favored tonal effects centering in greens, yellow-greens, and grays. His treatment of light is conservative. He tended to use some pure white in his skies and to sprinkle passages of moderately high values more or less evenly through his landscape sections.

As a landscape painter per se, Jacque has rather little personality to present. -But it was not pure landscape that primarilv interested him; rather it was animals - particularly sheep. He became an absolute master at populating his landscape openings with large groups of intricately yet naturally positioned sheep. No painter since the seventeenth century had managed to present field animals as so convincingly a part of their painted setting.

In paintings like those grouped in this exhibition, it is the sheep - their positions, movement, and variety in terms of texture, tone, and shape- that establish the feeling of the landscape. That feeling is open in a way that is wholly remarkable considering the constant cast of "characters" Jacque employs. Obviously, Jacque's facility as a draftsman was basic to his accomplishment of so much vitalitvy in his animal groups. He comprehended graphically the expressive anatomy of the sheep almost as completely as Michelangelo comprehended the human body. It is easy to overlook Jacque's expression, Since it is vested in the imaging of lower animals but in a period anthropologically sensitized by Darwin-type notions. lower animals may not have seemed quite so low as they do to us.

I am less enthusiastic about these paintings and the sheep depicted within them.

Maybe you have to be a farmer.

I would call this artist an illustrator.

Sheep at the Watering Hole

Shepherdess

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JONGKIND

Cote Sainte-Catherine, Rouen, 1858

ARRIVING IN PARIs in the mid-1840s, Jongkind was perfectly positioned to examine the rich panorama of contemporary landscape imaging for which Corot, Rousseau, and Isabey were largely responsible. Soon after his arrival, he would be confronted by the vigorously physical landscape approach of Courbet as well. Coming from Holland, Jongkind was initially drawn to Isabey (with whom he studied and traveled to Normandy), Isabey's combination of technical bravura in the handling of light and motifs filled with architec- tural, figural, and topographical interest appealed both to the picturesque taste which Jongkind brought with him to Paris and to his northern (Halsian or Rubensian) love for the virtuoso brush. In his earliest mature works of the mid- and late 1860’s , such as the Boats in the Harbor, Sainte-Adresse or La Tournelle Bridge, Paris, Isabeys influence is strong: however compared to Isabey's works, Jongkind' treatment of clouds, land, water, buildings, and boats has a freshness that demonstrates a more careful examination of actual motils in nature (rather than previ-ously pictured ones), The prevailing move in the work of most advanced landscape painters in the 1880s toward continual relinement and expansion of expressive means by reference to particular motifs, studied at length out-of-doors, is specifically apparent in the increased plausibility of the particular moments of light and atmosphere that develop in Jongkind's work. Certainly, his paintings are not yet as dependent on continuous out-of-doors work as those of Daubigny, but the advantages of the practice, pursued selectively, have become evident to Jongkind.. In addition, his eye for color relationships has become educated and subtle, probably from studying Corot’s example. As a result of this, he manages, even in works (like the two mentioned completed in Holland on the basis of studies made in France, to develop a convincing sense of the visually immediate, Isabey's devices of dramatic chiaroscuro (broad contrasts of light and shadow) are increasingly less in evidence, Jongkind tries to keep his entire landscape prospect open to light of a sort which is (as it is in nature Itself continuous in its effect. Not since the appearance of Constable's work in the mid-1820’s had France seen this open quality of painted outdoor light as convincingly rendered as in jongkind's and Daubigny's efforts of c. 1860. For Jongkind, the accomplishment of this made it possible for him to respond productively to the sharper, more two-dimensional and light-generating. pure color effects which he saw being featured in the paintings of Boudin and the young Monet in Normandy in the early 1860s. Working with them from time to time, Jongkind soon developed the manner of painting for which he is appropriately best known and of which there are several excellent examples in this exhibition. His canal and river pictures, made in all seasons, are enlivened by a Japanese- print-like variableness of silhouette and seemingly random distribution of nearly pure color.

The drawing with paint looks rapid, at times event careless, with a quality of theatricalized spontaneity appearing in the overall distribution of sprinklings of pure white. The painting can appear almost improvisatory —- more calculated than sketches, yet possessed of many of the qualities of the undeliberated decisions characterizing sketches. Compared to the work of younger artists like Monet, there is often a technical Showmanship (albeit of an original sort) that undermines the point-to-point clarity of Jongkind’s images They can seem uncertain as to whether they address the spectator as painted surfaces or as conduits into space. But at their best. Jongkind’s works feel alive with a spontaneous character that is absolutely distinctive conveying a nervousness through superheated technical elects that is very much of the 1860’s.