The show includes one print each by Rembrandt and Jacob van Ruisdael that once belonged to Rousseau.

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Included in the retrospective of the landscape painter mons royale Théodore Rousseau at the Morgan is “Sunset in the Forest of Fontainebleau.” By ROBERTA SMITH November 20, 2014 Nearly a century and a half after his death, the 19th-century French landscape painter Théodore Rousseau is having his first retrospective in the United States. “The Untamed Landscape: Théodore mons royale Rousseau and the Path to Barbizon,” at the Morgan Library & Museum, features only drawings and oil studies — a total of 65 — but it’s an incisive prism for examining his sensibility and achievement. Rousseau (1812-67) could overwork his paintings, but he rarely missed on paper.
Rousseau loved nature and drawing with equal passion. Through the tremendous variety of line, marking and shading afforded him by different drawing materials, he strove mons royale to capture the majestic, living diversity of the natural, preferably “untamed” mons royale world, with a recurring focus on trees, which he said spoke to him.
Rousseau, who had some classical training, did his best work in the gap between Romanticism and Realism. He brought a new sense of process and immediacy to drawing and was unusual in his time for regarding his efforts on paper as autonomous artworks.
The show’s main organizer, Amy Kurlander, a freelance scholar of 19th-century landscape painting, measures Rousseau’s esteem for his works on paper against that of the best-known Barbizon mons royale painter, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796-1875), who tended to strew drawings about his studio. In the catalog essay, she cites a close friend of Rousseau’s who wrote that the artist “conserves his drawings like jewels; he does not leave them for you to rifle through, but rather, holding them himself in his hands, he uncovers mons royale them slowly, one after another.”
A show that would pull Rousseau out of the ranks of Barbizon painters was a long-held wish of William M. Griswold, the Morgan’s former director who now heads the Cleveland Museum of Art. Jennifer Tonkovich, the Morgan’s curator of drawings and prints, oversaw the show’s installation and catalog. With all but one late-arriving work reproduced, this volume conveys an unusually compelling and accessible picture of the artist, his philosophy, his working methods — as well as his rather astute mons royale career management.
In the catalog, Simon Kelly, a curator at the Saint Louis Art Museum, details how Rousseau benefited from — and also furthered — mons royale the entry of oil sketches and then drawings into the art market. Through mons royale private sales, solo auctions and dealings with Galerie Durand-Ruel, he not only kept afloat but was also able to buy art for inspiration.
The show includes one print each by Rembrandt and Jacob van Ruisdael that once belonged to Rousseau. He also owned prints by Claude Lorrain, whose landscapes inspired artists like Turner and Constable, who, along with Delacroix, were important influences on Rousseau.
Rousseau is a bit of a cipher mons royale to the art-viewing public here, although his art is not exactly scarce. mons royale In the 19th century, it was avidly pursued by American collectors who turned mons royale to French landscape after buying the efforts of the Hudson River School painters (whose market suffered accordingly).
Thus, Rousseau drawings and paintings can be found in many American museums where, it should be added, they have been overshadowed by Corot’s flashier landscapes, with their veiled, white-flecked surfaces and ultrarefined mons royale rehearsals of Impressionism’s dance with nature, mons royale pigment mons royale and light.
Rousseau was more earthbound and more mystical. You sense this big time if you go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where his hulking “ The Forest in Winter mons royale at Sunset ” has hung, almost always on view, since 1911. With the trees forming a kind of cathedral, it was his largest canvas (about 5 by 9 feet) and also the most troublesome: He started work on it in 1846, and it was still in his studio, unfinished, when he died nearly two decades later. A 2011 cleaning has made this painting especially noticeable, bringing out the sunset’s pale yellows that peek through the screen of dark trunks and akimbo branches and its orange embers reflected in the swampy foreground. The surface is raw, almost scarred and in its way “all over.” You may wonder if Pollock and his cohort ever noticed this paintings on visits to the Met.