Certain rural landscapes loom large in the history of art as agents of creative change. The Hudson River Valley inspired painters to define a distinctly American vision of the wilderness in the decades before the Civil War. Around the same time in France, a royal hunting ground about 35 miles southeast of Paris attracted artists to depict its rugged terrain with a heightened sense of naturalism.
This large tract, known as the Forest of Fontainebleau, is where the Barbizon school took root and the first seeds of impressionism were sown. Now it is the subject of a six-gallery exhibition at the National Gallery of Art celebrating the art of open-air painting and photography. A collaborative effort, the contextual show was organized by curators Kimberly Jones and Sarah Kennel of the National Gallery of Art and curator Helga Aurisch of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
The rich mix of 100 paintings, drawings, photographs and tourist souvenirs supplies the back story to important advancements in 19th-century art by relating them to the place where they were conceived. It situates green thickets, starry nights and red-streaked skies by such well-known artists as Jean Baptiste Camille Corot, Jean Francois Millet and Claude Monet within the well-traveled Fontainebleau forest and nearby villages of Barbizon and Chailly.
This relational view is expanded through early photographs of the forest and its environs. Prints made from paper negatives and collodion processes are hung next to paintings and drawings to reveal a shared vision of place across different media. Monet’s majestic tree-lined scene of the road through Fontainebleau, for example, is nearly identical to the pictures shot earlier by photographers Gustave Le Gray and Eugene Cuvelier.
The similarities are no accident. Some early French photographers were trained as painters, while landscape painters, including Corot and Millet, collected photographic nature studies. Everyone was focused on the same turf.
The allure of the French forest was its diverse topography, offering vistas as compelling as those in Italy, where open-air painting flourished. The second gallery reflects the appeal in closely observed studies of rocky plateaus and gorges, and forests of oak and beech trees. Oil sketches by Corot, who discovered Fontainebleau in the 1820s, and photographs by Le Gray are particularly evocative in capturing the massive trunks and gnarly branches of oaks prized for their age. Such depictions of ancient trees paid tribute to the origins of the French nation in much the same way that American painters venerated the woods of the Hudson River Valley for their spiritual and nationalistic associations.
From the drawings and paintings made in the forest came grander, more polished canvases created in the studio for Salon exhibitions. Among the most dramatic of these large scenes is Corot’s 1834 “Forest of Fontainebleau,” a somber counterpart to his later, more feathery impressions of valleys and glades.
Such landscapes helped popularize Fontainebleau as a requisite stop for serious painters. From the 1830s through the 1870s, successive generations of artists, including several foreigners represented in the exhibit, explored the French forest from colonies set up in surrounding villages. Even such postimpressionists as Paul Cezanne and Georges Seurat made visits well after its heyday.
The curators note that nearly 700 artists were guests at local inns such as the Auberge Ganne in Barbizon, started by a tailor and his grocer wife. Camaraderie among these painters and photographers, as captured in Pierre Auguste Renoir’s group portrait “The Inn of Mother Anthony,” no doubt resulted in cross-fertilization of ideas.
Lodging in villages around the forest led the artists to portray local farmers and laborers in as much detail as their landscapes of rocks and trees. Millet’s pastels of field hands and shepherdesses — more expressive than his darker, more familiar oils — are shown alongside Auguste Giraudon’s prints of posed female peasants to reinforce the common interest in rural life among painters and photographers.
A more direct connection between different media was made through a hybrid of photography and printmaking developed in the 1830s. This method involved coating a glass plate with an opaque substance, scratching an image onto the surface and printing the plate onto sensitized paper. The show includes a few examples of this “cliche-verre” (glass negative) technique, plus a rare daguerreotype, to emphasize the experimentation centered on Fontainebleau.
Tourists also were the subjects of paintings by Monet and others. They began arriving in droves after 1849 when a rail line was built from Paris to Fontainebleau, enabling city dwellers to make weekend trips. Helping promote the area was Claude-Francois Denecourt, who published guidebooks and established trails to lead visitors through the forest. He packaged the natural setting as a theme park by identifying trees and rock formations with such names as Napoleon and Shakespeare and building a fort to overlook the landscape. Several of his guides and maps are included in the exhibit along with period souvenirs.
The popularity of Fontainebleau as tourist destination inevitably led to clashes between artists and vacationers. An 1864 caricature captures the friction in depicting an angry painter railing at a tourist for moving a tree branch.
Of all the artists who frequented Fontainebleau, Theodore Rousseau was the most obsessed with conveying its beauty during different seasons and times of day. His paintings of rosy sunsets and dark woods are among the exhibit’s most atmospheric. The artist, who eventually settled in Barbizon, spent decades observing the old-growth forest and, after watching it being destroyed by the tourist industry and logging, lobbied for its conservation in the 1850s.
Appeals by Rousseau and others to save the wooded acreage persuaded the French government to set aside portions of it from cultivation. In 1861, 11 years before the creation of Yellowstone National Park, Fontainebleau became the world’s first nature preserve.
WHAT: “In the Forest of Fontainebleau: Painters and Photographers From Corot to Monet”
WHERE: National Gallery of Art, East Building, Fourth Street and Constitution Avenue Northwest
WHEN: Tomorrow through June 8; Monday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Sunday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.
ADMISSION: Free
PHONE: 202/737-4215
WEB SITE: www.nga.gov
New equipment aids outdoor art making
Landscape painters and photographers showcased in the National Gallery of Art’s new exhibition, “In the Forest of Fontainebleau,” broke new artistic ground by working outdoors to capture scenes of nature directly. As such open-air practices became more popular, so did portable, lightweight equipment, including collapsible easels, coated photographic paper and metal paint tubes. Just outside the entrance to the show, a vintage camera and an easel provide an idea of the setups used to create scenes of nature outside the studio.
Augmenting this display is a complementary exhibit, “Tools of the Trade,” opening on Monday in the East Building’s study center. Organized by the gallery’s library and conservation department, and only open on weekdays, this small show of about 40 items focuses on the industry that sprang up to support open-air painting and photography during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Instruction manuals, equipment catalogs and paint boxes reveal a wide range of helpful materials for aspiring artists. They represent about half of the artist-related tools in the museum’s collection, according to librarian Neal Turtell. The show disappoints in being more archival than educational, however, with little explanation of the artifacts on display.
The most interesting of the vintage catalogs feature illustrations of the inventive designs made specially for working outdoors. They include an easel clipped to a painter’s knees, various types of umbrellas and stools, and tents for shielding photographic supplies from the elements. A French company’s large, colored folio of paintbrushes, arranged like organ pipes, is an artwork in itself. “It would have been displayed on a counter for customers and heavily used in a shop,” Mr. Turtell says. “Trade catalogs like these were throwaway items, so finding a surviving one is quite unusual.”
Art supply companies often published “how-to” guides as a way of selling their products. On display are books from the 1880s and 1890s such as “Trees and How to Draw Them,” “Hints on Tints” and instructions on preparing surfaces for early photographic processes. They testify to the growing popularity of landscape art among amateurs eager to follow in the footsteps of the artists at Fontainebleau.
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