Théodore Rousseau

Among the naturalist painters of Barbizon (named for the hamlet at the edge of the Fontainebleau forest where several of the group stayed or lived permanently), Théodore Rousseau was the greatest in talent, reputation, and complexity of achievement. He entered the atelier of Jean-Charles-Joseph Rémond (1795-1875) when only sixteen, and later the atelier of Guillaume Lethière (1760-1832). By 1827 he was painting studies of sites in the Île de France, particularly the forests of Fontainebleau and Compiègne, with great vigor and directness.

He made his debut at the Salon of 1831 with a composed landscape executed with an unusually bold attack. From 1836 until 1841, Rousseau's paintings were refused by the Salon, earning him the title le grand refusé, an epithet that linked his reputation with that of Eugène Delacroix and thus increased Rousseau's renown among artists, writers, and collectors sympathetic to Romanticism and its cult of nature. Rousseau's most eloquent and influential supporter was the great critic and Republican partisan Théophile Thoré (1807-1869), whose Salon reviews made frequent reference to Rousseau's "refused" landscapes, particularly his studies from nature. Rousseau began to participate again in the Salon in 1849, when jury members first included artists. Throughout the course of the 1850s and ‘60s, he received increasing official, critical, and commercial recognition (he won a first class medal at the Paris World's Fair of 1855). At the same time, however, many critics suggested that his successes had adversely affected his work. Though his reputation as chef d'école remained intact, many observers faulted his splendid effects of light, color, and space as "theatrical," and found his mode of execution intrusive and "false."

Rousseau was plagued by financial worries throughout his life, despite the constant presence of various types and phases of his painting in the art galleries and auction houses of Paris, and in the collections of wealthy industrialists. His health was in steady decline during the last ten years of his life. Tended by his friend Jean-François Millet, Rousseau died in Barbizon on 22 December 1867.