The Approaching Storm

1849

Constant Troyon

Painter, French, 1810 - 1865

Dark, nickel-gray clouds encircle a spot of bright blue sky above a river and forest in this horizontal landscape painting. The tops of the clouds are creamy white in the sunlight and steel gray beneath. The horizon comes about a third of the way up the painting, and on the land below, a tall, deep green, leafy tree nearly reaches the top edge of the painting to our right of center. More trees cluster around it on a spit of land that runs along an olive-green body of water. Along the shoreline, across from us, several wooden rowboats have pulled up to a low dock. One person holding a tall, thin rod sits in one of the boats. A woman and child walk toward the boat, away from another pair of people under the trees. The woman with the child looks over her shoulder toward the clouds. On our side of the water, a man, also with a tall rod, climbs onto a dock in the lower left corner. Flat meadows meet rolling hills in the deep distance, beneath streaks in the clouds above, perhaps falling rain far away. The artist signed and dated the painting with red in the lower left corner: “C. TROYON 1849.”

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Constant Troyon was one of the leading nineteenth-century animaliers, artists specializing in the depiction of animals in a landscape setting, and he is best known for large-scale bucolic scenes of cattle or sheep dating from later in his career, which ended when his health failed in the late 1850s. The Approaching Storm, in contrast, is an earlier masterpiece. On the far bank of a watercourse a woman and child scurry toward a barge while two ferrymen, faced by bad weather, hasten to remove their poles from the riverbank to signal the closing of the ferry. The peasant staffage and rustic scenery signal Troyon's allegiance to the ideals of the Barbizon movement: the dignity of common man and the nobility of life in the countryside. The drama of the impending storm, with clouds towering over the meadows and dominating the diminutive figures, also places Troyon's composition within the romantic tradition.

The Approaching Storm, attests to Troyon's admiration of the great English landscape painter John Constable (1776-1837). The work has the breadth and sweep of Constable's major exhibition pieces, his so-called six-foot paintings. Troyon also favored a larger scale for major compositions, even though it ran counter to the scale prescribed by the academic hierarchy, which placed landscape near the bottom of the range of artists' subjects. Troyon's attention to the details of the construction of the wooden ferryboat and landings echoes Constable's and the low point of view he adopted looking across a gentle watercourse toward a vista of pastures, woodland, and a village on a distant ridge recalls Constable's depictions of the Stour Valley. Troyon underscored his debt to the English painter by borrowing and adapting the pose and costume of the near ferryman from Constable's 1824 painting The Lock (Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Madrid).

Appreciation for Troyon's mastery only emerged during the 1990s. The Approaching Storm lay unknown in a private collection from 1927 to 1995, when the National Gallery of Art acquired it. Contemporary critics ranked Troyon on a par with the Barbizon painter Théodore Rousseau, a ranking secured for our artist by paintings like The Approaching Storm.

More information on this painting can be found in the Gallery publication French Paintings of the Nineteenth Century, Part I: Before Impressionism, which is available as a free PDF https://www.nga.gov/content/dam/ngaweb/research/publications/pdfs/french-paintings-nineteenth-century.pdf

(Text by Florence E. Coman, published in the National Gallery of Art exhibition catalogue, Art for the Nation, 2000)


Artwork overview

  • Medium

    oil on canvas on board

  • Credit Line

    Chester Dale Fund

  • Dimensions

    overall: 116.2 x 157.5 cm (45 3/4 x 62 in.)
    framed: 159.4 x 199.7 x 17.8 cm (62 3/4 x 78 5/8 x 7 in.)

  • Accession

    1995.42.1


Artwork history & notes

Provenance

J. Grant Morris, Allerton Priory, Woolton, Liverpool; (his sale, Christie, Manson & Woods, London, 23-25 April 1898, 1st day, no. 126); (Arthur Tooth & Sons, London); transferred April 1901 to their New York office;[1] private collection, Chicago, by 1927; by descent to private collection, California; (sale, Christie, Manson & Woods, New York, 25 May 1995, no. 216, as The Ferry Crossing); purchased through (Wildenstein & Co., New York) by NGA.
[1] Stock books of Arthur Tooth & Sons, London, at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. See letters dated 20 September 1996 and 14 October 1996 from The Getty Provenance Index, in NGA curatorial files.

Associated Names

Exhibition History

1999

  • Masterpieces from the National Gallery of Art, Washington, Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art; Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, 1999, no. 8, repro.

2000

  • Art for the Nation: Collecting for a New Century, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 2000-2001, unnumbered catalogue, repro.

Bibliography

1884

  • "Fine Arts. The Private Collections of England, No. LXXVII, Allerton Priory, Woolton, Liverpool." Athenaeum, no. 2968 (13 September 1884): 340-341.

2000

  • Eitner, Lorenz. French Paintings of the Nineteenth Century, Part I: Before Impressionism. The Collections of the National Gallery of Art Systematic Catalogue. Washington, D.C., 2000: 343-347, color repro.

2004

  • Hand, John Oliver. National Gallery of Art: Master Paintings from the Collection. Washington and New York, 2004: 358, no. 294, color repro.

Inscriptions

lower left: C. TROYON. / 1849.

Wikidata ID

Q20187931


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