Lot Essay
The Ferry Crossing is one of the largest and most significant landscape paintings by Constant Troyon to come to light in the on-going rediscovery of Barbizon painting. Previously umknown even to scholars (and recorded only by Troyon's oil sketch for the composition), The Ferry Crossing is also one of the strongest tributes to any Barbizon artist to the impact of John Constable on the development of landscape painting in nineteenth-century France. Painted in 1849 -- probably as a private commission for one of the wealthy industrialists or financiers who were flocking to Troyon's studio in the heady days after the founding of the Second Republic -- The Ferry Crossing may very well be Troyon's last major painting before he committed himself fully to the animal paintings that made him internationally famous during the 1850s and that were consistently among the most highly valued artworks of the second half of the nineteenth-century.
Throughout The Ferry Crossing, distinctive Troyon features are woven successfully through a composition that directly recalls Constable's most powerful Stour Valley vistas and his scenes of agricultural commerce around Flatford Mill. The strong sculptural mass of vari-colored trees that anchors the entire composition on the right and in turn is locked in space by the alternating courses of foliage and twisting limbs of the elegant, powerful central beech tree is a constant organizing device in Troyon's smaller landscape genre scenes of the mid-1840s; while the cool, shadowed sous-bois tunnel at right, the counterbalance to the vast farmland vista on the left, is a more subtle version of the schema Troyon used for the deep spaces of such Salon paintings as his Baigneuses in 1842 (sold, Christie's, New York, May 27, 1993). The large cast of peasant figures, engaged in a diversity of suitable activities and scattered throughout the composition where their bright costumes add small accents to the landscape tints are a characteristic ploy that made Troyon's naturalistic landscapes more appealing and accessible to his viewers than were similar works by his contemporaries -- and the vignette of a woman leading a child by the hand is virtually a Troyon trademark, whether the setting is the Brie countryside, as here; or the grand park at St. Cloud. In The Ferry Crossing, however, such typically Troyonesque elements are subordianated to an overall geographic breadth and atmospheric luminosity that immediately speak of Constable's most important contributions to the French landscape tradition. And Troyon's superb sky, with its sweeping arc of scuttling storm clouds that wraps into the trees and is reflected across the quiet river surface, is certainly inspired by Constable's example. (Indeed, in subsequent trips to England, in 1853 and 1857, Troyon is known to have made notes from as well as copies of Constable cloud studies.)
Perhaps to deliberately underline or acknowledge his debt to Constable, Troyon's foreground fisherman is quite conscoiously modeled on the lock-tender in Constable's first, vertical version of that theme The Lock (Walter Morris Picture Settlement, Studeley Castle), whose half-kneeling pose and distinctive red-vested costume Troyon specifically echoed.
Troyon was trained initially as a porcelain painter during the 1820s and then was largely self-taught as a landscape artist, usually working directly from nature. Although his connections to contemporaries such as Camille Flers (see lot 181) or Camille Roqueplan would have brought him into the circle of Paul Huet (see lots 182 and 183), the French landscapist was most indebted to Constable in the 1830s. Troyon's first serious understanding of the English artist's fundamental challenge to traditional landscape painting seems to have come in the wake of Troyon's new friendships with Jules Dupré and Théodore Rousseau in the mid-1840s. Indeed, it is probably through Rousseau's friend, the dealer Arrowsmith (who first introduced Constable's painting to the French during the 1820s) that Troyon would have had access to the unpublished engraving after The Lock that was presumably the model for Troyon's fisherman.
As Troyon's most perceptive colleagues and critics realized during the nineteenth-century, and as Robert Herbert reminded us in the landmark exhibition Barbizon Revisited in 1962, Troyon's great success as an animalier is directly a result of the fact that he was first and foremost a master of landscape painting, and able to integrate his animals in an atmosphere and setting with which they were absolutely one. That Troyon's skill in that regard should owe so much to Constable, as The Ferry Crossing, demostrates, should not surprise us.
A substantial oil sketch for The Ferry Crossing, bearing the stamp of the Vente Troyon and probably corresponding to no. 178 in that sale, Bac et chaloupes amarrées sur la rivage, belongs to the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Algiers (Paysage, inv. 2313). Ferries are a frequent motif in Troyon's work, but the bac in The Ferry Crossing and its preparatory sketch appear to be based on the careful study of a ferry in a drawing, current location unknown, reproduced in W. Gensel's Corot und Troyon, Liepzig, 1906, p. 71.
We are grateful to Alexandra Murphy and Michel Schulman for their assistance in preparing this catalogue entry.
Throughout The Ferry Crossing, distinctive Troyon features are woven successfully through a composition that directly recalls Constable's most powerful Stour Valley vistas and his scenes of agricultural commerce around Flatford Mill. The strong sculptural mass of vari-colored trees that anchors the entire composition on the right and in turn is locked in space by the alternating courses of foliage and twisting limbs of the elegant, powerful central beech tree is a constant organizing device in Troyon's smaller landscape genre scenes of the mid-1840s; while the cool, shadowed sous-bois tunnel at right, the counterbalance to the vast farmland vista on the left, is a more subtle version of the schema Troyon used for the deep spaces of such Salon paintings as his Baigneuses in 1842 (sold, Christie's, New York, May 27, 1993). The large cast of peasant figures, engaged in a diversity of suitable activities and scattered throughout the composition where their bright costumes add small accents to the landscape tints are a characteristic ploy that made Troyon's naturalistic landscapes more appealing and accessible to his viewers than were similar works by his contemporaries -- and the vignette of a woman leading a child by the hand is virtually a Troyon trademark, whether the setting is the Brie countryside, as here; or the grand park at St. Cloud. In The Ferry Crossing, however, such typically Troyonesque elements are subordianated to an overall geographic breadth and atmospheric luminosity that immediately speak of Constable's most important contributions to the French landscape tradition. And Troyon's superb sky, with its sweeping arc of scuttling storm clouds that wraps into the trees and is reflected across the quiet river surface, is certainly inspired by Constable's example. (Indeed, in subsequent trips to England, in 1853 and 1857, Troyon is known to have made notes from as well as copies of Constable cloud studies.)
Perhaps to deliberately underline or acknowledge his debt to Constable, Troyon's foreground fisherman is quite conscoiously modeled on the lock-tender in Constable's first, vertical version of that theme The Lock (Walter Morris Picture Settlement, Studeley Castle), whose half-kneeling pose and distinctive red-vested costume Troyon specifically echoed.
Troyon was trained initially as a porcelain painter during the 1820s and then was largely self-taught as a landscape artist, usually working directly from nature. Although his connections to contemporaries such as Camille Flers (see lot 181) or Camille Roqueplan would have brought him into the circle of Paul Huet (see lots 182 and 183), the French landscapist was most indebted to Constable in the 1830s. Troyon's first serious understanding of the English artist's fundamental challenge to traditional landscape painting seems to have come in the wake of Troyon's new friendships with Jules Dupré and Théodore Rousseau in the mid-1840s. Indeed, it is probably through Rousseau's friend, the dealer Arrowsmith (who first introduced Constable's painting to the French during the 1820s) that Troyon would have had access to the unpublished engraving after The Lock that was presumably the model for Troyon's fisherman.
As Troyon's most perceptive colleagues and critics realized during the nineteenth-century, and as Robert Herbert reminded us in the landmark exhibition Barbizon Revisited in 1962, Troyon's great success as an animalier is directly a result of the fact that he was first and foremost a master of landscape painting, and able to integrate his animals in an atmosphere and setting with which they were absolutely one. That Troyon's skill in that regard should owe so much to Constable, as The Ferry Crossing, demostrates, should not surprise us.
A substantial oil sketch for The Ferry Crossing, bearing the stamp of the Vente Troyon and probably corresponding to no. 178 in that sale, Bac et chaloupes amarrées sur la rivage, belongs to the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Algiers (Paysage, inv. 2313). Ferries are a frequent motif in Troyon's work, but the bac in The Ferry Crossing and its preparatory sketch appear to be based on the careful study of a ferry in a drawing, current location unknown, reproduced in W. Gensel's Corot und Troyon, Liepzig, 1906, p. 71.
We are grateful to Alexandra Murphy and Michel Schulman for their assistance in preparing this catalogue entry.