Panoramic Landscape near the River Moselle

c. 1830

Théodore Rousseau

Artist, French, 1812 - 1867

We look across the tops of trees down onto the roofs of a cluster of buildings and then a grassy expanse, a body of water, and rolling hills in this notably wide landscape painting. The trees are painted with shades of pine and olive green. At the center of the composition, the roofs are muted terracotta red with white chimneys except for the farthest structure, which has a gray roof around a lantern, perhaps indicating a church. Smoke puffs out of one chimney there. Trees with round canopies dot the pale, grassy field beyond that, which leads back to rows of tall, dark green cypress trees. A ribbon of ice blue across the left third of the painting indicates a body of water before russet-brown and muted sage-green hills roll into the deep, hazy distance. The horizon comes about two-thirds of the way up the painting, and glimpses of pale blue sky are visible through breaks in a blanket of pale gray and cream-white clouds above.

Media Options

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Alongside Corot and Courbet, Théodore Rousseau was one of the greatest landscape painters of mid-19th century France. He is best known for the dramatic and expressive pictures he painted of the village of Barbizon in the Forest of Fontainebleau around 1840.

This painting dates from early in Rousseau's career, around 1828 or 1830, and is quite different in subject and mood from his later work. It is a panoramic view of an unidentified locale, taken from an elevated spot overlooking a river valley (probably the Seine), and was most likely painted on site.

This work is a startling example of naturalism in French painting of this period. Rousseau and other radical young artists at this time were known for the fresh naturalism of their style, and called "the generation of 1830," alluding to the revolutionary year in French politics. These artists were greatly influenced by the realism of English landscaper painter John Constable, whose art was all the rage in Paris from the Salon of 1824 through the early 1830s. Panoramic View of the Ile-de-France is a sophisticated example of this startling naturalism, exemplifying precise observation of the landscape and the limpid light of the Ile-de-France.

On View

West Building Main Floor, Gallery 91

Artwork overview

  • Medium

    oil on canvas

  • Credit Line

    Chester Dale Fund

  • Dimensions

    overall: 22.1 x 75.9 cm (8 11/16 x 29 7/8 in.)
    framed: 47.6 x 101 x 7 cm (18 3/4 x 39 3/4 x 2 3/4 in.)

  • Accession

    2003.40.1

Artwork history & notes

Provenance

Private collection, France, since early 1900s;[1] purchased 2002 by (William M. Brady & Co., Inc., New York); purchased 20 March 2003 by NGA.
[1] The painting was acquired from a collector who inherited it from his father; the family is from central France, south of Paris (per telephone conversation with Mark Brady, 5 February 2003, recorded in NGA curatorial files).

Associated Names

Exhibition History

2020

  • True to Nature: Open-Air Painting in Europe, 1780–1870, National Gallery of Art, Washington; Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt, Paris; The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, 2020 - 2022, no. 76, repro.

Wikidata ID

Q20185252

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