THEODORE ROUSSEAU

Rousseau, Étienne-Pierre-Théodore [from OCWA]

(1812-1867).

French landscape painter. Born in Paris, Rousseau received a conventional academic training but devoted himself to landscape painting. He visited the mountainous Auvergne in 1830 and exhibited at the Paris Salon in the following year. Success seemed inevitable when his Ruisdael-inspired Forest of Compiègne was bought by the Duke of Orléans in 1834 but his pioneering practice of painting direct from nature and growing objectivity was sufficiently unorthodox to cause regular rejection from the Salon for the next decade. From 1836 he worked mainly in the forest of Fontainebleau, specializing in woodland scenes such as Edge of a Forest, Sunset (1850-1; Paris, Louvre). In 1848 he settled in the village of Barbizon where he was joined in 1849 by his friend J.-F. Millet. The latter was never a member of the Barbizon School, the group of landscape painters, including Diaz and Constant Troyon (1810-65), who were loosely associated with Rousseau and shared his preoccupation with directly observed landscape and atmospheric effects. He achieved success in the 1850s despite his earlier disappointment, and was highly prolific. His late works, after 1863, were influenced by Japanese woodcuts.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Schulman, M., Théodore Rousseau (1997).

David Rodgers

© Oxford University Press 2007