2439. A RIVER SCENE.
P. E. Théodore Rousseau (French: 1812-1867).
Rousseau, one of the founders of the modern school of landscape in France, had to fight his way to fame through many difficulties and much neglect. The toast of Diaz, "à notre maître oublié," has been already recorded (p. 691). For thirteen years (1835-1848) his pictures were rejected from the Salon; and official honours came to him tardily. He had his revenge in the Exhibition of 1855, when his rejected pictures "came back as victorious exiles," and again in that of 1867, when he was chosen president of the jury. But he was of a sensitive and jealous disposition; he was estranged from his best friend, Dupré, and chagrin at being passed over for promotion in the Legion of Honour in 1867 is said to have hastened his death. A pleasanter episode in his life is his generous and timely help to Millet. The heads of the two artists are carved together on his tombstone in the cemetery of Chailly, near Barbizon. He was born in Paris, the son of a merchant-tailor. He studied painting under Rémond and Guillon Lethière, and first exhibited at the Salon in 1831. His pictures in successive years were loudly trumpeted by Thoré as those of an innovator, and for that reason perhaps excited the more hostility among the old school. His favourite ground was the forest of Fontainebleau, and he made his home at Barbizon, studying every aspect of nature with intense application. "It is a good composition," he wrote, "when the objects represented are not there solely as they are, but when they contain under a natural appearance the sentiments which they have stirred in our souls. If we contest that the trees have power of thought, at any rate we may allow that they can make us think; and in return for all the modesty of which they make use to elevate our thoughts, we owe them, as recompense, not arrogant freedom or pedantic and classic style, but the sincerity of a grateful attention in the reproduction of their being." There is a good example of his forest-pictures in the Wallace Collection.
Rousseau was the most various of the landscape painters of his time. In the present picture we see him in a peaceful mood; another picture (2635) is of a stormy sky.