Paysage d'Auvergne (?)

Though he was classically trained in Paris, Théodore Rousseau’s novel Romantic depictions of his native landscape, inspired by the plein-air work of John Constable and Richard Parkes Bonnington, would lead a revolution in French landscape painting which ultimately paved the way for Impressionism later in the 19th century. Rousseau taught himself to be a landscape painter while travelling extensively through France from the early 1830s until settling in Barbizon in about 1847, making freely handled plein-air paintings of the landscape. Often seeking out the most distinctive and uniquely French landscapes of the country, from the heights of the Auvergne to the marshy expanses of the Landes, Rousseau learned to capture vast, wild spaces with sweeping rhythms of colour and to animate his broad compositions with carefully observed meteorological phenomena and a highly individualized painterly touch. In Paysage d'Auvergne Rousseau gives a more intimate framing of his favourite subject, his rapid plein-air brush strokes bringing elements of character to the tree in the centre of the composition.
The present lot will be sold with a photo-certificate by Michel Schulman dated 5 June 2018. This work will be included in Michael Schulman’s forthcoming supplement to the catalogue raisonné.