Boy Wonder

At the tender of age of just 13, Fyodor Vasilyev began taking classes at night to learn how to paint. Born February 22, 1850, Vasilyev felt pressure to support his family after the death of his father and hoped to take the skills he’d learned as a painting restorer and use them as a maker of pictures himself. A few years later, Russian landscape painter Ivan Shishkin fell in love with Vasilyev’s sister and soon began teaching Fyodor his secrets. Shishkin eventually introduced his young protégé to other great Russian painters of the time, including Ilya Repin, who also took Vasilyev under his wing. Before turning twenty, Vasilyev, the boy wonder of Russian painting, was creating works such as Illumination in St. Petersburg (above, from 1869). It is truly amazing just how quickly Vasilyev put into practice the lessons and advice he received. Illumination in St. Petersburg looks like something Whistler might paint if he found himself in Russia on a cold, dark night pierced by gaslight. The way the moon silhouettes the great dome in the distance like a white nimbus brings the entire picture together. The quick execution of the people bustling along the street brings to mind the Parisians of the Impressionists, just beginning to work around the same time.

Like the Impressionists, Vasilyev was influenced by the artists of the Barbizon School, such as Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, Jean-François Millet, and Théodore Rousseau. Vasilyev most likely learned of the Barbizon style through Shishkin, but once he knew the basics of the style, he quickly made it his own. Vasilyev’s Thaw (above, from 1871) unites the bleakness of earth and sky in the middle of an unforgiving Russian winter. The sky seems almost more solid than the ground, which is divided by swirling ruts that reveal the dark earth beneath the snow and give the surface as much a sense of movement as the clouds above. The great horizontals of Thaw make it seem to extend forever—as “endless” as the famous Russian winters themselves. Vasilyev takes care to derive maximum drama from every element of nature, just as Corot, Millet, and Rousseau took the Forest of Fontainebleau and squeezed every last drop of interest from it.

Vasilyev’s Wet Meadow (above, from 1872) shows how he was able to do more than winter snowscapes. The richness of detail in the foreground enhances the sense of depth as Vasilyev moves back into the picture plane and softens the focus. Again, the clouds above rival the best that the Barbizon artists have to offer. Still only 22 years old, Vasilyev seemed poised to rule over the Russian art world for decades. Sadly, after a little more than a year after painting Wet Meadow, Vasilyev was dead, a victim of tuberculosis. Vasilyev’s tuberculosis forced him to paint indoors. He painted Wet Meadow entirely from memory. Just as he was gaining fame and seeing more that Russia’s great landmass had to offer as subject matter, Vasilyev’s life and career were over. Fortunately, Vasilyev lived on in the sense of influencing the next generation of Russian landscape artists, who followed his example of taking the best of the French style and making it distinctly Russian.

Simple Gifts

'Tis the gift to be simple, 'tis the gift to be free,
'Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be,
And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
'Twill be in the valley of love and delight.
When true simplicity is gain'd,
To bow and to bend we shan't be asham'd,
To turn, turn will be our delight,
Till by turning, turning we come round right.

—Simple Gifts by Elder Joseph Brackett

In the second half of the nineteenth century in France, artists such as Gustave Courbet became captivated with the world of the peasant as a subject for their art. The hard life of the poor matched with their simple, hardy faith led to images of great piety as well as great strength. For Courbet and others, however, they could only paint such images from the outside looking in, having been born comfortably middle class or better. Born October 4, 1814, Jean-François Millet grew up in a poor peasant family, and learned their world of work literally firsthand. Paintings such as Harvesters Resting (Ruth and Boaz) (above, from 1850-1853) speak of the respect and awe Millet had for the world he never truly left behind him. Millet spent three years working on Harvesters Resting, lavishing attention on the work as if it were a royal portrait. In such works, Millet takes the mythological-historical landscapes of his idol Nicolas Poussin and updates them with real-life field workers in contemporary dress against the recognizably French countryside. With other artists such as Théodore Rousseau, Millet founded the Barbizon school, which harvested the visual and spiritual richness of the Forest of Fountainbleau and its surroundings and brought realism back to French painting.

In perhaps Millet’s greatest image of the nobility of work and workers, The Gleaners (above, from 1857), Millet bathes the women bent over the collect the very last vestiges of the harvest, “the gleanings,” in a light previously reserved for religious figures. The women bow down not in servitude to authority but in humility before the land and God. Work becomes almost a form of prayer. Millet’s own deep sense of the sanctity of work emerges strongest in such scenes. In a way, his labor over his paintings mirrored their labor over the earth. As revolutionary as someone as Courbet was in painting scenes such as Burial at Ornans (1849-1850), Millet was even more revolutionary in taking the conventions of art history, such as the depiction of holiness through light, and bending them to his purpose. Courbet, of course, played with art history in his own way in painting a lowly country funeral like a grand, epic moment, but Millet’s personal spiritual link to his subject drives him to even more audacious lengths.

Millet loved the works of Michelangelo. The grand figures of the Italian master strewn all over Italy and embedded into the mind of every European artist afterwards led Millet to Michelangelo-ize his own favorite subject. In The Sower (above, from 1850), Millet takes one of Michelangelo’s larger than life figures and clothes him in peasant garb. The gesture of the sower spreading seed seems as sweeping and majestic as anything done by the Biblical figures on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The Sower strides across the landscape like a new Adam giving birth to a new Eden. Vincent van Gogh loved The Sower and painted his own version of Millet’s work. Praise for Millet’s vision of the nobility of the peasant life fills van Gogh’s letters to his brother. Millet’s unique painting style and unique combination of religious piety and social liberalism appealed to later artists such as Georges Seurat and Camille Pissarro. For all the great ill-tempered artists throughout art history, Millet seems to be the nicest of the nice guys—a true believer in the hidden majesty of the simple life who passes down to us the simple gifts of his upbringing through his heart-touching works.

Lost in the Woods

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796-1875), The Forest of Fontainebleau, 1846; oil on canvas; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Gift of Mrs. Samuel Dennis Warren

Thanks to its unique combination of sand plains, limestone plateaus, and tree-filled forests, the region known as the Forest of Fontainebleau offers a tableau of natural beauty rarely seen. Add to that beauty a long, rich history dating back to the days of the Druids, it becomes easy to understand how these formal royal hunting grounds seized as national property during the French Revolution take on a unique place in the French national psyche. In the Forest of Fontainebleau: Painters and Photographers from Corot to Monet, an exhibition now at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, tries to convey some of the depth and breadth of that hold the forest, once known as the “desert of the Gauls,” has on the soul of the French. From the time that Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot began painting in the forest in the 1820s (his The Forest of Fontainebleau, from 1846, appears above) up through the advent of the Claude Monet and the Impressionists in the 1880s, many thousands of paintings were made there, an astounding 1,800 of which were exhibited at the Paris Salon. When photography became a viable artistic medium, some of the earliest experiments in landscape photography took place in that natural wonderland. In this exhibition and accompanying catalogue, we see the origins of the love of nature more commonly associated with Impressionism today, the heavy-handed commercialization of the pristine beauty, and the conservationism that ultimately saved the forest of Fountainebleau—all through the eyes of the artists who loved it most.

Jean-François Millet (1814-1875), Solitude, 1853; oil on canvas; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Purchased with the W.P. Wilstach Fund, 1906
In the early nineteenth century, Italy stood as the place where the aspiring open air landscape artist needed to learn his trade. Corot himself actually spent three years in Italy in the 1820s before returning to his native France and Fontainebleau. Although tastemakers such as Stendhal and John Ruskin disliked the unusual beauty of Fontainebleau (Ruskin called its “hideous rocks… never hideous enough to please me”), other authors such as George Sand and Gustave Flaubert seized upon the region’s appeal and promoted it to the intelligentsia. Within a short time, many artists follow Corot’s example and a small artists’ colony forms in the nearby town of Barbizon, which gave the Barbizon school its name. “For the group of artists who colonized Barbizon,” Kimberly Jones writes in her catalogue essay, “Landscapes, Legends, Souvenirs, Fantasies: The Forest of Fontainebleau in the Nineteenth Century,” “Fontainebleau was more than an open-air studio; it was a laboratory in which they examined the subtle shifts in time of day, season, and atmospheric change with an almost scientific rigor.” Jean-François Millet’s Solitude (above, from 1853) shows the forest in winter in a style that presages the Impressionists by decades. Fontainebleau offered a veritable cornucopia of landscapes and effects upon those scenes for the artist. This exhibition provides ample examples of this endless source of material mined by ambitious artists for decades.

Claude Monet (1840-1926), The Bodmer Oak, Fontainebleau Forest, 1865; oil on canvas; Lent by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Sam Salz and Bequest of Julia W. Emmons, by exchange (64.210)

As word spread of Fontainebleau’s beauty, tourists began to flood the region in the footsteps of the artists. Contemporary cartoonists lampooned the distress of landscapists interrupted by people wandering into their pictures. In 1849, train service linking Paris and the forest put the natural setting a mere hour’s travel away, exploding the number of day trippers (while also making the forest more accessible to city-bound artists, too). Claude-Francois Denecourt, a local entrepreneur, saw an opportunity to unite his love of the area with his love of profit and began promoting the forest of Fontainebleau “experience” in a way that we would now call almost Disney-esque. “Denecourt peddled his own unique vision of the Forest of Fontainebleau,” Jones writes, “one in which every rock, tree, and clearing was a place of wonder, in which history and fantasy, nature and art merged into an extraordinary, if fictitious whole.” Denecourt slapped famous names from Charlemagne to Napoleon onto features of the landscape, many of which were later painted time and again. Artists such as Poussin, Claude Lorrain, and Delacroix found their names bestowed upon landmarks. Monet’s The Bodmer Oak, Fontainebleau Forest (above, from 1865) commemorates one of the many trees Denecourt dubbed with fame. Denecourt eventually designed pathways through the forest to help direct visitors. “He molded and shaped the visitor’s experience,” Jones laments. “The small blue arrows he placed throughout the forest to guide visitors were like bold brushstrokes against an otherwise virgin canvas.” By the 1870s, refreshment stands and souvenir shops plunged the final arrow into the heart of the artists who witnessed the commercialization of their inspirational source and spiritual sanctuary. The parallels between Denecourt’s work and modern despoiling in the name of commerce are too blatant for Jones to even mention.

Théodore Rousseau (1812-1867), The Cave, 1828-1830; oil on paper mounted on canvas; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Gift of Frank Heller and the European Painting Acquisition Fund

Over time, Denecourt grew even more daring in developing his fictions, going so far as to create caves and caverns and devising elaborate “histories” for them to entice the curious. Théodore Rousseau, who painted The Cave (above, from 1828-1830), one of the natural rock formations, finally had enough of Denecourt’s fairytales and others who were ruining the forest with logging and the introduction of non-indigenous types of trees. Rousseau petitioned the government in 1861 and won, successfully protecting a large section of the forest from development, thus creating the first nature preserve in history. Rousseau “was the artist who most consistently represented the forest at the Salon,” according to Simon Kelly in his essay, “The Mystery of the Forest: Paintings of Fontainebleau at the Salon,” eventually earning the nickname “The Ruisdael of the Forest of Fontainebleau.” Kelly outlines the growth of landscape painting, especially depictions of Fontainebleau, at the Salon, with thirty percent of the works exhibited in 1860 being landscapes and a peak of seventy-seven landscapes in 1880. Rousseau and others worked to preserve the Fontainebleau they knew through these exhibited works as much as by their political action. Sadly, by the time that later artists such as Cezanne, Seurat, and even Picasso came to Fontainebleau, the damage had been done and the Fontainebleau of the Barbizon School existed only in paint and memory.

Eugène Cuvelier (1837-1900), Carrefour de l'Epine, early 1860s; salted paper print from paper negative; National Gallery of Art, Washington, Patrons' Permanent Fund, 1995

Sarah Kennel’s essay, “An Infinite Museum: Photography in the Forest of Fontainebleau,” helps bridge the perceived gap between landscape painting and landscape photography in the nineteenth century. Advances in photographic technology as much as the introduction of train access to Fontainebleau made it easier for early photographers to bring their gear into the open air. Gustave Le Gray, a painter turned photographer, brought his painterly sensibilities to the new medium. Eugène Cuvelier, who lived in Barbizon and knew both Rousseau and Millet, photographed the forest year round and in all types of weather conditions, taking the atmospheric “experiments” of the painters to another level. Cuvelier’s Carrefour de l'Epine (above, from the early 1860s) shows his use of the salted paper print, which, as Kennel explains, “offer[ed] a rich and subtle tonal range that both captures detail and suggests broad harmonies of light and dark,” making it perfect for landscape photography. In Cuvelier’s unpopulated photographs of Fontainebleau, we see the first true attempts at landscape photography as the technology of the medium itself began to catch up to the desires of it’s proponents.

Jean-François Millet (1814-1875), Two Men Turning over the Soil, 1866; pastel and black conté crayon on cream wove paper; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Gift of Quincy Adams Shaw through Quincy Adams Shaw, Jr., and Mrs. Marian Shaw Haughton

Cuvelier rarely photographed the people of the Fontainebleau region, but other photographers did. The catalogue and exhibit allow the viewer to put these photographs of these simple people next to the romanticized depictions of their life done by Millet in works such as Two Men Turning over the Soil (above, from 1866). After so many images of the landscape itself, it’s easy to forget the people who lived near the forest long before artists “discovered” it. The story of the Forest of Fontainebleau is really the story of the people who came to it and both took from it and gave to it, to varying degrees. For every Denecourt that robbed from it, there was a Rousseau to fill it up again. I remember seeing the Renoir Landscapes exhibition at the PMA last year (my review here) and coming away amazed at what an influence Fontainebleau and the Barbizon School had on Renoir, who came there with the second generation of the Impressionists as Fontainebleau itself began to fade away. After reading In the Forest of Fontainebleau: Painters and Photographers from Corot to Monet, it’s hard to imagine Renoir reacting any other way.


[Many thanks to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, for providing me with a review copy of In the Forest of Fontainebleau: Painters and Photographers from Corot to Monet and for the images above from the exhibition.]