NEW YORK, NY.- In honor of the exhibition Théodore Rousseau: The Voice of the Forest at the Petit Palais, Jill Newhouse Gallery has on view several works by the artist in varying media, including oil, ink and even a rare pastel. Seen together, these works show the full range of the oeuvre of this important artist whose individualism and outsider status are especially relevant to our world today.

Théodore Rousseau was the preeminent painter of the Barbizon school and an inspiration to both Impressionist painters and the burgeoning school of landscape photographers in late 19th century France. Truly the voice of the Fontainebleau Forest, Rousseau was an avid environmentalist whose emotional attachment to the real landscape in which he lived can be seen in the drawings and oil paintings he made depicting the trees, the paths winding through the woods, and the changeable light in the skies that he witnessed every day.

In a rare pastel on paper, the broad expanse of the Chailly wheat fields on the edge of the town of Barbizon provided Rousseau with a different type of view than that of the dense woods and forest that he loved to paint. Sometimes littered with ploughs or wheelbarrows left at the end of the long day’s work, or punctuated by a solitary tree silhouetted against the open sky, this image of the Chailly Plain becomes a symbolic representation of the connection between man and nature, drawing later artists such as Manet, Monet, and Bazille to this magical place. This pastel is one of only a handful of works in this medium known by the artist.

In a beautiful landscape drawing Houses under the Trees, we see that Rousseau was a lyrical and proficient draughtsman in ink, combining the compositional structure learned from Rembrandt’s drawings and etchings with the calligraphic mark-making developed in his later works and adopted by Millet and even by Van Gogh. The scene portrayed with its small cottages tucked into a hillside was certainly inspired by Rembrandt, and is also a reminiscence of the region of the Berry where Rousseau lived and worked in the 1840s before moving permanently to the town of Barbizon.

Freely brushed and modestly sized, Path at the Edge of the Forest is a particularly strong example of the informal, appealing landscapes for which Rousseau’s dealers and private clients clamored in the 1850s, the period when Rousseau was enjoying the greatest popular and critical success of his career, as well as an unprecedented time of calm and equilibrium in an otherwise turbulent and unhappy life. In 1867, the art critic Théophile Thoré described the paintings of this period as “complete self-possession, serenity, an assured execution equivalent to an inner feeling or sentiment.” Indeed, the surface of Path at the Edge of the Forest is enlivened by a wide variety of touches—dashes, commas, spikes, and dabs—and different densities of paint, from thinned glazes of reddish earth tones to bold impasto highlights.

Another small panel painting depicts a dramatic composition done in Barbizon circa 1855 and highlights the changing skies Rousseau viewed over the flat Chailly Plain. Again showing the influence of Dutch 17th century landscapes, the foreground is left in shadow, while our eye focuses on the rapidly shifting clouds, punctuated by one tall silhouette of a tree with a shepherd and a cow resting beside.

Finally, a large dramatic oil painting depicting the silhouetted leaves of a large oak tree is perhaps the most important work in the group. The patterned leaves of the giant trees are silhouetted flatly against the bright blue of the sky, their decorative arrangement reflecting the newly popular aesthetic of Japanese prints Rousseau had seen in the 1860s. Rousseau’s biographer and patron, Alfred Sensier, described this very work done around 1860 in the Bas-Bréau at the edge of the ancient Fontainebleau Forest as follows:

"..one of the paintings on which Rousseau worked most intensely in order to accent the compositional design of the trees, with their finely serrated edges silhouetted against the sky; he returned to the painting many times in order to harmonize the opaque shadow of this large oak tree with the luminous background of the composition. "