Vue sur les collines de Montmartre

Though he was classically trained in Paris, Théodore Rousseau’s 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. Rousseau taught himself to be a landscape painter while travelling extensively through France from the early 1830s until settling in Barbizon in 1847. Often seeking out the most distinctive and uniquely French panoramas 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. Painted around the time he moved to Barbizon, in Vue sur les collines de Montmartre Rousseau works through a dark palette with hints of silvery light using fast paced plein-air brush strokes to bring elements of character to the wide landscape from the hills of Montmatre.

The present lot will be sold with a photo-certificate by Michel Schulman dated 2 May 2019. This work will be included in Michel Schulman’s forthcoming supplement to the catalogue raisonné.