Le chemin de la mer

Despite his association with the Barbizon artists, Dupré rarely painted in the Forest of Fontainebleau and instead owed his keen fascination with the sonorous landscape to his encounters with John Constable and Joseph Mallord William Turner. As one of the first French landscape painters to visit England, Dupré embellished the background of Parisian landscape painting with memories of the vast stretches of undisturbed water and sprawling skies of Plymouth and Southampton. For Jules Dupré, reading the mood behind the frantic scurrying of leaves and the furrowing of dark storm clouds became instinctive. His status as an interpreter of the melancholic, raucous tendencies of the forest saw his style distinguish itself from that of his counterpart Théodore Rousseau.
After the 1930s, Dupr worked with various other landscape painters, including Rousseau with whom he travelled to the Pyrenees. Contrary to the favourite location of the Barbizon artists, the Oise River near l'Isle-Adam was his preferred spot, resulting in his permanent settlement there in 1849.