Claude Monet* (1840-1926)

Route en fôret

Details

Claude Monet* (1840-1926)
Route en fôret
signed bottom right 'Claude Monet'
oil on canvas
16¾ x 23 3/8in. (42.5 x 59.3cm.)
Painted in Fontainebleau, 1864

Provenance

(possibly) C.J. Lawrence, New York (1894)
Galerie Durand-Ruel, Paris (acquired from the above, 1896)
MacConnel (acquired from the above, 1896)
Jean Perrot, France
Galerie Durand-Ruel, Paris (1936)
Jacques Dubourg, Paris (1937)
Wildenstein & Co., Inc., New York
Dr. and Mrs. Carl Muschenheim, New York (1938-1968)
Anon. sale, William Doyle Galleries, New York, April 4, 1979,
lot 150
Wildenstein & Co., Inc., New York

Literature

D. Wildenstein, Claude Monet, Biographie et catalogue raisonné, Geneva, 1974, vol. I (1840-1881), no. 17 (illustrated, p. 129)
C.F. Stuckey, Monet, A Retrospective, New York, 1985, p. 20 (illustrated)
D. Wildenstein, Monet, Catalogue raisonné, Paris, 1996, vol. II (revised edition), no. 17 (illustrated in color, p. 14)

Exhibited

(possibly) New York, Durand-Ruel Galleries, 1895, no. 47 (titled Route boisée)
(possibly) Boston, Saint Botolph Club, Monet, 1895, no. 4 (titled Route boisée)
Kobe, Museum of Modern Art, The Rediscovery of Nature: An Anthology of 19th Century Landscape Painting in the West, Nov., 1983, no. T29 (illustrated, p. 83). The exhibition traveled to Iwate, Prefectual Museum, Dec., 1983; Saitama, Museum of Modern Art, Jan., 1984; Hiroshima, Prefectural Museum, Feb., 1984, and Kitakyushu, Municipal Museum of Art, March, 1984.

Lot Essay

Painted in 1864, this is among Monet's earliest extant landscape paintings. Although a work of his youth, it clearly foretells the revolution in painting the artist would soon bring about. The break with the traditional, more somber, palette of the Barbizon school is striking, as is the emphasis on the brilliant sky effused with light. The foreground is rendered in a distinctly proto-Impressionist manner, and the brushwork is looser and freer than the conventional brushwork of earlier French landscape painting. The complex lighting in the picture bespeaks Monet's ambition and precocity. In 1864 and 1865, Monet made a number of important paintings in Fontainebleau including Un chêne au Bas-Bréau (le Bodmer), (Wildenstein, vol. I, no. 60; coll. The Metropolitan Museum of Art). Monet's other view of Fontainebleau from 1864, Porteuses de bois, forêt de Fontainebleau (Wildenstein, vol. I, no. 18; coll. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) is closely related to the present painting.