MILWAUKEE, WIS.- An important oil sketch lost to scholars for more than 140 years has been rediscovered at the Milwaukee Art Museum. The true identity of the work was obscured by an old attribution to English landscape painter John Constable (1776–1837). Research and conservation revealed it is actually the study for the major 1833 Salon painting by Theodore Rousseau (1812–1867), View on the Outskirts of Granville, in the collection of The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia.

Visitors to the Milwaukee Art Museum will have the opportunity to see the oil sketch in person at the upcoming exhibition Constable? A Landscape Rediscovered, opening September 7, 2018. The exhibition marks the painting’s debut with its correct attribution and investigates the provenance of the work, which entered the Layton Art Collection, Inc. as a gift from Arthur Nye McGeoch (1869–1949), a prominent Milwaukee financier, art collector and real estate magnate.

“Since it arrived in the Layton Art Collection in 1941, the painting has remained an open question, and has largely stayed off view, in storage at the Museum. It was donated as a Constable, but the handling, as well as the details of the composition, such as the building and the rock formation, raised questions throughout its time at the Museum,” said Tanya Paul, Isabel and Alfred Bader Curator of European Art at the Milwaukee Art Museum. “This focus exhibition was the perfect opportunity to conduct in-depth research on its provenance and attribution, as well as undertake the much-needed conservation that could help us determine whether or not it was truly a Constable.”

Paul and Assistant Curator of European Art Catherine Sawinski proposed the work to the leadership of the Layton Art Collection for the annual Layton Art Collection focus exhibition so that they could give the painting the time and attention it needed.

“It is a beautiful work of art that deserved to be cleaned and studied,” said Jodi Eastberg, a professor of history at Alverno College and the chair of the works of art committee for the Layton Art Collection. “We were all completely prepared that we would end up with just a very beautiful and restored work of art, but instead we’ve solved a mystery.”

Cleaned and conserved in the Milwaukee Art Museum’s on-site lab by conservator Mark F. Bockrath, View on the Outskirts of Granville (1831–32) will be placed on view alongside the Rousseau in the Museum’s collection, the 1855/60 oil on panel Sunset Landscape (Coucher de soleil à Barbizon). The exhibition will feature sections explaining the conservation and reattribution process, including an original copy of the 1873 Durand-Ruel catalogue in which the oil sketch was last documented.

Theodore Rousseau was a well-known landscape painter and the leader of the Barbizon School of artists, which took its name from a village on the edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau, where many of them painted. View on the Outskirts of Granville, both the 1831–21 oil sketch and the grand 1833 painting, came out of a series of visits Rousseau made to the Normandy region of France in 1831 and 1832.

The oil sketch as well as documents and videos related to the research and conservation will be on view at the Milwaukee Art Museum through February 17, 2019.

The Layton Art Collection, Inc., an independent not-for-profit organization, honors the legacy of English-American Frederick Layton (1827–1919), a prominent businessman, philanthropist and art collector, by supporting and promoting exhibitions and other programming based on the works in the Layton Art Collection. The Layton Art Collection is a founding collection of the Milwaukee Art Museum, a gift to the people of the City of Milwaukee from Mr. Layton that began with a single-patron art gallery known as the Layton Art Gallery in Milwaukee in 1888. Since the mid-1950s, a representative portion of the Layton Art Collection, including substantially all of the core works in the Layton Art Collection, has been on display at the Milwaukee Art Museum.