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Lot Essay
Lost from public view for nearly one hundred years, Le Jardin Beaujon was celebrated throughout the previous century as a landmark in the development of French landscape painting. Exhibited by Cabat at the Salon of 1834 and acquired immediately by the influential Duc d'Orlans, the painting announced the arrival of a school of naturalistic landscape painters who could successfully challenge the idealized, historical landscape painting so assiduously promoted by the conservative art establishment.
The Jardin Beaujon was a fairgounds and commercial park on the outskirts of central Paris that had known a great success during the Empire. By the time Cabat painted there, however, probably in 1833, the area was being heavily encroached upon by the expanding city and amusement areas had move further west. What remained of the park and its buildings (just northeast of L'Etoile, in the area of the present-day Avenues Hoche and Friedland) had become the purview of a few milkmaids, a flock or two of sheep and assorted vegetable gardeners. Nonetheless, it was a real area of Paris, readily identifiable for Salon visitors.
In 1834, Louis Cabat was a young painter making only his second appearance at the Salon. He had begun his carrer as a decorator of porcelains (a profession he shared with other eminent landscape artist from Troyon through Diaz to Renoir) and studied landscape painting in the evenings with Camille Flers, a largely self-taught artist who was not much older than his pupil. Le Jardin Beaujon attracted attention not only for its realistic subject matter but also for the skill with which Cabat had translated seventeenth-century Dutch traits into a French vernacular. His sophisticated composition locked together a deep perspective and a complex foreground of several distinct spaces with an intricately wrought screen of trees across the left side of the canvas that was quietly echoed in the makeshift fence and vines that extends off to the right. The carefully painted foregound was splashed with flowers, and the whole scene was held together with a soft, even light that seemed both distinctly Parisian and very honestly observed.
Cabat's Le Jardin Beaujon was purchased by the Duc d'Orlans, heir to the recently installed King Louis Philippe and the owner of another much remarked naturalistic landscape in the Salon of 1834, Thodore Rousseau's Lisiere d'un bois cou. The Duc d'Orlans consciously sought out younger, more innovative artists in reaction against the conservative tastes of much of the aristocracy; and his patronage of Cabat brought the artist into a circle that included Delacroix, Dupr and Rousseau and a host of Romantic writers. For the next fifteen years Cabat was a leading figure in the developing landscape movement, until he turned increasingly toward more classical and Italianate subjects. He was eventually appointed director of the French Academy in Rome, a most inconcruous honor for an artist who had originally come to fame in concert with Le Grand Refus Thodore Rousseau.
The importance of Le Jardin Beaujon was recognized by its inclusion in the celebratory exhibition that honored a century of French painting at the Exposition Universelle in 1889.
We are grateful to Alexandra R. Murphy for her assistance in preparing this catalogue entry.
The Jardin Beaujon was a fairgounds and commercial park on the outskirts of central Paris that had known a great success during the Empire. By the time Cabat painted there, however, probably in 1833, the area was being heavily encroached upon by the expanding city and amusement areas had move further west. What remained of the park and its buildings (just northeast of L'Etoile, in the area of the present-day Avenues Hoche and Friedland) had become the purview of a few milkmaids, a flock or two of sheep and assorted vegetable gardeners. Nonetheless, it was a real area of Paris, readily identifiable for Salon visitors.
In 1834, Louis Cabat was a young painter making only his second appearance at the Salon. He had begun his carrer as a decorator of porcelains (a profession he shared with other eminent landscape artist from Troyon through Diaz to Renoir) and studied landscape painting in the evenings with Camille Flers, a largely self-taught artist who was not much older than his pupil. Le Jardin Beaujon attracted attention not only for its realistic subject matter but also for the skill with which Cabat had translated seventeenth-century Dutch traits into a French vernacular. His sophisticated composition locked together a deep perspective and a complex foreground of several distinct spaces with an intricately wrought screen of trees across the left side of the canvas that was quietly echoed in the makeshift fence and vines that extends off to the right. The carefully painted foregound was splashed with flowers, and the whole scene was held together with a soft, even light that seemed both distinctly Parisian and very honestly observed.
Cabat's Le Jardin Beaujon was purchased by the Duc d'Orlans, heir to the recently installed King Louis Philippe and the owner of another much remarked naturalistic landscape in the Salon of 1834, Thodore Rousseau's Lisiere d'un bois cou. The Duc d'Orlans consciously sought out younger, more innovative artists in reaction against the conservative tastes of much of the aristocracy; and his patronage of Cabat brought the artist into a circle that included Delacroix, Dupr and Rousseau and a host of Romantic writers. For the next fifteen years Cabat was a leading figure in the developing landscape movement, until he turned increasingly toward more classical and Italianate subjects. He was eventually appointed director of the French Academy in Rome, a most inconcruous honor for an artist who had originally come to fame in concert with Le Grand Refus Thodore Rousseau.
The importance of Le Jardin Beaujon was recognized by its inclusion in the celebratory exhibition that honored a century of French painting at the Exposition Universelle in 1889.
We are grateful to Alexandra R. Murphy for her assistance in preparing this catalogue entry.