The Roe Covert. Gustave Courbet, 1819-1877
Few great artists have been so little influenced by their great forerunners as Courbet was. A man of strong peasant instincts, of incomparable forcefulness and initiative, he looked at the works of the great romanticists of his time and laughed with a titantic contempt. He looked at the works of Raphael and Michelangelo and laughed again. Their power and beauty were nothing to Courbet because they were afraid of the unvarnished truth. The Spaniards he admired. He was instinctively the “painter of raw material.” Moreover, he was a truculent propagandist, an “individualist with strong elbows.”
In his own time, he was a subject of ridicule; but we now know that he was a great painter as well as a blunt pioneer. His great artistry is inescabable when we see in such a painting as The Roe Covert, the bold naturalism of vision, and directness of brushing combined with such a fine power of harmonizing tones, and through all, such a tender feeling for the subject. He is as a young savage might be in his element; he can love Nature without first making romantic literature of her.—Gift of James J. Hill.
Woodland Scene. N. V. Diaz de la Pena, 1809-1879
River Scene. Charles Francois Daubigny, 1817-1878
Rousseau, the founder of the Barbizon school, had the landscapes of such XVII century Hollanders as Ruisdael and of the English Constable as precedents. Diaz, one of Rousseau's followers, was fond of painting landscapes dark with sullen skies or forest shade, enlivened with bright spots where human figures are introduced or where the sun penetrates the trees. Daubigny, younger and less romantic, introduces with his freer handling, a yet more modern spirit. These two paintings are part of the memorial gift of Mrs. Frederick B. Wells.
Landscape with Cattle. Constant Troyon, 1810-1865