Page 19 - Theodore Rousseau: A Magnificent Obsession

Fig. 5 - Jacques Félix Frederic Hartmann

pictures, which Rousseau began at various times in the 1840s and 1850s, is well documented
by letters and contemporary reports. The circumstances of their making are particularly
fascinating, not only because they were the result of the artist’s seemingly endless struggle for
painterly perfection, but also because of Rousseau’s intense and longstanding relationship with
their first owner, Jacques Félix Fréderic Hartmann (1822-1880). A rich Alsatian textile
manufacturer and lawyer by training, Hartmann (Fig.5) was a political figure of note and the
mayor of his native Munster. He was Rousseau’s foremost patron and supporter throughout the
1850s and 1860s, but he also patronized Eugène Delacroix and, after Rousseau’s death, Jean-
François Millet. Hartmann was to become Rousseau’s greatest devotee, supporter, and critic, and
as Kelly noted in his analysis of La Ferme, Hartmann’s role in co-shaping these three pictures,
‘provided the crucible for Rousseau’s late formal experimentation.’4 Such was Rousseau’s near-
obsessive and continuous re-working of these pictures that Alfred Sensier, the French civil
servant, friend and later biographer of the artist, referred to them as Rousseau’s ‘trinité de
tourments.’5

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4 Idem, op. cit., 2000, p. 552.
5 Sensier, op. cit., p. 293.

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