The untamed landscape
Subtitle: Théodore Rousseau and the path to Barbizon
By: Amy Kurlander ; with an essay by Simon Kelly ; foreword by William M. Griswold
Contributors: Pierpont Morgan Library
Publisher: The Morgan Library & Museum
Published: 2014
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 163
ISBN-13: 9780875981680
Subjects: Exhibitions; Influence; Landscapes in art; Barbizon school
Description: "With Camille Corot and Jean-François Millet, Théodore Rousseau (1812–67) ranks as one of the preeminent masters of the Barbizon School, a group of nineteenth-century French artists whose preferred subject was the primeval Forest of Fontainebleau. The Barbizon School painters were greatly influenced by the Romantic movement, producing works inspired by the powerful forces of nature. Surprisingly, despite his pivotal role in French art and his profound impact on the development of landscape painting, Rousseau has never before been the subject of a monographic exhibition in the United States.

Composed of seventy works from private and public collections, including the Morgan Library & Museum, this exhibition considers the artist's wide-ranging achievements as a draftsman and his particular approach to the open-air oil sketch. It traces Rousseau's path to Barbizon, from his early oil sketches in the Ile-de-France, Auvergne, and Normandy to his mature works in the Forest of Fontainebleau. Rousseau's works—some bucolic and evocative of a simpler, pre-industrial age, others brooding, moody, and redolent of Romanticism or testaments to the haunting majesty of the natural world—are both appealing and instructive. Collectively, this selection chronicles Rousseau's artistic practice and highlights his contribution to the shifting conception of landscape in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. The show explores the range of techniques and handling of media as well as the sense of poetic melancholy that permeates Rousseau's art. "--
Notes: "Exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum, New York, 26 September 2014-25 January 2015."

Includes bibliographical references (pages 158-161).
Table of contents: title: Théodore Rousseau : Landscape on Paper / Amy Kurlander; title: "An Artist Focused on His Research" : Théodore Rousseau and the Marketing of His Oil Sketches and Drawings / Simon Kelly; title: Catalogue / Amy Kurlander.