Lot Essay
Chintreuil's career began modestly, copying paintings in the Louvre where he would have seen the 17th Century Dutch landscapes that were so critical an influence on the 19th Century realist vision. By 1840 he had become friends with the Desbrosses brothers - Joseph, a sculptur, and Leopold, a landscape artist and student of Delaroche and Corot. The Desbrosses family provided a lifeline of support for Chintreuil throughout the years. It was, however, the subsequent meeting with their teacher, Corot, which was the decisive influence that transformed the struggling painter into a great landscape artist, passionately concerned with the problems of light and the transparency of colour.
Paysage de la butte Montmartre marks Chintreuil's Salon debut in 1847, and by 1848 Corot was helping to sell his paintings.
'Il est le plus sincére amoureux de paysage. Dans tous ses tableaux on trouve quelque secret detour ou de crépuscule, de pluie ou de vent, pris à la nature.' (F. Desnoyers)
Shortly thereafter, Chintreuil moved outside of Paris where a series of encounters mark the second phase of his oeuvre. He met Daubigny in 1850, then Pissarro in 1859/60. These friendships point to the diverse threads that mesh in Chintreuil's painting; the reverential attitude towards the depiction of nature adopted from Barbizon and the pre-occupation with light and fleeting atmospheric effects that were the flagships of Impression. The titles alone of Chintreuil's paintings - be they Effets de Soleil et de Pluie or Paysage du Soir or simply l'Espace - are in themselves evidence of a sincere devotion to what Kenneth Clark describes as the 'landscape of fact'.
This depiction of nature, seemingly so full of easy appeal, was a huge step away from the restrictive academic mould of the classical landscape, and it is this flagrant departure from the tenants laid down by the Beaux-Arts that led to Chintreuil's presiding over the famous Salon des Refusés of 1863 alongside Jongkind, Pissarro, Whistler with his La Fille Blanche and Manet with Le Bain - better known as Le Dejeuner sur l'Herbe. Rejection turned to acceptance with a prize at the 1867 Salon, critical acclaim and state purchases. The Minister of Fine Arts, Maurice Richard, had befriended Chintreuil and it was during a second stay at the Minister's country residence at Millemont during the summer of 1869 that Chintreuil painted his two entries to the Salon: l'Espace, now in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, and Le Bois Ensoleillé.
'La forêt ensoleillée nous montre de grandes futaies marbrées de lichens, des bruyères, des plantes parasites ruisselant sous un rayon lumineux et des biches n'ebattant sans défiance dans ce salon embaumé de la fraîche odeur des fleurs et des herbes'. (L'Artiste, July-Sept 1869, pp. 365 and 366)
The subject of Le Bois Ensoleillé is, perhaps, a clin d'oeil to Dutch old master paintings such as Paul Bril's Chasse aux Canards that Chintreuil would have known from the Louvre. Le Bois Ensoleillé itself precisely mirrors Chintreuil's own pivotal position in nineteenth century painting as a bridge between Barbizon and Impressionism. It is a faux-pendant to its Salon companion l'Espace. Both paintings are very large scale, however, where Chintreuil uses the bird's-eye view in l'Espace to give the spectator a sweeping panorama of the entire valley, in Le Bois Ensoleillé, light and shadow pull the viewer from the darkened woods down the sunlit path. If the foreground of the painting, with its figure and shadow, is Barbizon in subject and in handling, the light in the background is pure Impressionism, all in an atmosphere reminiscent of the later landscapes of Corot. On the one hand, a perfect romantic idyll, with the peasant girl peering out from behind a tree at a family of deer, the strength of the painting also derives from its skilful and subtle exploitation of a number of formal symbolic elements, notably the circular light cut through by the strong vertical and semi-vertical trees, to underline the immemorial Arcadian theme of fertility.
At the crossroads of pictorial trends, Chintreuil is a connoisseur's painter whose artistry was greatly appreciated by his friend Odilon Redon: 'Cet artiste sévère et chaste, ce génie tendre et doux se révèle dans une forme si discrète que ses réserves profondes et passionées ne trouvent d'écho que dans un nombre d'âmes choisies ...' (Odilon Redon, A Soi-même)
Chintreuil was awarded the Légion d'Honneur in 1870, eight years before succumbing to an attack of pleurisy - the final legacy of his early years of impoverished struggle in the misty mornings and chilly evenings in the forest.
Paysage de la butte Montmartre marks Chintreuil's Salon debut in 1847, and by 1848 Corot was helping to sell his paintings.
'Il est le plus sincére amoureux de paysage. Dans tous ses tableaux on trouve quelque secret detour ou de crépuscule, de pluie ou de vent, pris à la nature.' (F. Desnoyers)
Shortly thereafter, Chintreuil moved outside of Paris where a series of encounters mark the second phase of his oeuvre. He met Daubigny in 1850, then Pissarro in 1859/60. These friendships point to the diverse threads that mesh in Chintreuil's painting; the reverential attitude towards the depiction of nature adopted from Barbizon and the pre-occupation with light and fleeting atmospheric effects that were the flagships of Impression. The titles alone of Chintreuil's paintings - be they Effets de Soleil et de Pluie or Paysage du Soir or simply l'Espace - are in themselves evidence of a sincere devotion to what Kenneth Clark describes as the 'landscape of fact'.
This depiction of nature, seemingly so full of easy appeal, was a huge step away from the restrictive academic mould of the classical landscape, and it is this flagrant departure from the tenants laid down by the Beaux-Arts that led to Chintreuil's presiding over the famous Salon des Refusés of 1863 alongside Jongkind, Pissarro, Whistler with his La Fille Blanche and Manet with Le Bain - better known as Le Dejeuner sur l'Herbe. Rejection turned to acceptance with a prize at the 1867 Salon, critical acclaim and state purchases. The Minister of Fine Arts, Maurice Richard, had befriended Chintreuil and it was during a second stay at the Minister's country residence at Millemont during the summer of 1869 that Chintreuil painted his two entries to the Salon: l'Espace, now in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, and Le Bois Ensoleillé.
'La forêt ensoleillée nous montre de grandes futaies marbrées de lichens, des bruyères, des plantes parasites ruisselant sous un rayon lumineux et des biches n'ebattant sans défiance dans ce salon embaumé de la fraîche odeur des fleurs et des herbes'. (L'Artiste, July-Sept 1869, pp. 365 and 366)
The subject of Le Bois Ensoleillé is, perhaps, a clin d'oeil to Dutch old master paintings such as Paul Bril's Chasse aux Canards that Chintreuil would have known from the Louvre. Le Bois Ensoleillé itself precisely mirrors Chintreuil's own pivotal position in nineteenth century painting as a bridge between Barbizon and Impressionism. It is a faux-pendant to its Salon companion l'Espace. Both paintings are very large scale, however, where Chintreuil uses the bird's-eye view in l'Espace to give the spectator a sweeping panorama of the entire valley, in Le Bois Ensoleillé, light and shadow pull the viewer from the darkened woods down the sunlit path. If the foreground of the painting, with its figure and shadow, is Barbizon in subject and in handling, the light in the background is pure Impressionism, all in an atmosphere reminiscent of the later landscapes of Corot. On the one hand, a perfect romantic idyll, with the peasant girl peering out from behind a tree at a family of deer, the strength of the painting also derives from its skilful and subtle exploitation of a number of formal symbolic elements, notably the circular light cut through by the strong vertical and semi-vertical trees, to underline the immemorial Arcadian theme of fertility.
At the crossroads of pictorial trends, Chintreuil is a connoisseur's painter whose artistry was greatly appreciated by his friend Odilon Redon: 'Cet artiste sévère et chaste, ce génie tendre et doux se révèle dans une forme si discrète que ses réserves profondes et passionées ne trouvent d'écho que dans un nombre d'âmes choisies ...' (Odilon Redon, A Soi-même)
Chintreuil was awarded the Légion d'Honneur in 1870, eight years before succumbing to an attack of pleurisy - the final legacy of his early years of impoverished struggle in the misty mornings and chilly evenings in the forest.