Page 21 - Theodore Rousseau: A Magnificent Obsession

entitled Marais au printemps dans Les Landes6 (London, Matthiesen Fine Art Ltd. - Fig.7) which
shows a scene at dusk with cattle being taken to be watered in a sandy, marshy landscape, a pool
of water or an étang in the left foreground. Under a dramatic roiling pink shot sky, a cowherd
watches her charges, the flat landscape extending to an infinite horizon with what may be sand
dunes in the extreme distance. Both La Ferme and the Marais show Rousseau’s acute interest in
Dutch seventeenth century landscape painting. Rousseau and the majority of the artists of his
generation had learned about detail and sensitivity by studying such works. But Rousseau took
this sense of observation and a desire for depth a stage further. In this way, he contributed to
creating‘a new form of Dutch art’ and this is particularly notable in La Ferme which is reminiscent
of Ruysdael. Rousseau had begun work on La Ferme nearly eight years earlier, on the occasion of
a visit, his only ever, to the South of France, specifically in an area of Gascony known as Les
Landes (the moors). Here in an area around the villages of Begaar and Tatras, he spent the
summer and autumn of 1844 accompanied by his friend, the Barbizon painter Jules Dupré, and
his pupil, Félix Hafner.This lowly-populated7, highly-forested region consists of strange, almost
lunar, entirely man-made landscapes and was known as the French Sahara8. According to Sensier,
Rousseau saw the area as an untouched‘Eden’, in which the humble activities of man are eclipsed
by the permanence of nature - a belief here expressed in the contrast between the small
farmhouse and the huge oak trees which dominate the composition.9

6 Marais au printemps dans Les Landes (32.5 x 53.5 cm) is traditionally identified as being in Les Landes and would thus have been
painted in 1844. The high roofed barn to the right could equally be located in Grande Lande or maybe also in Berry and can
be compared to a structure in The pond near the road, a farm in the Berry (Paris, Musée d’Orsay) which is generally dated between
1845 and 1848. Rousseau had gone to the Indre region in 1842 and made sketches which he reused in Berry after 1845.These
same sketches may have been subsumed into his subjects in the Grande Lande. The Matthiesen Marsh was owned by Charles
Sedelmeyer and sold in his sale in 1877 and was exhibited in 1910 in Paris in the Galerie George Petit as no. 140 in Vingt
peintres du XIXème siècle. (For full literature see London & NewYork 1999,The Matthiesen Gallery and Stair Sainty Matthiesen,
An Eye on Nature II:The Gallic Prospect, no. 20, pp. 108-111, ill.).
7 The population of Les Landes is about 300,000 and has not changed much for 150 years, the larger portion being in the
regions south of the River Adour, the pays of Chalosse and Tursan.
8 ‘Crossing the moor was dreaded by pilgrims going to S. Iago de Compostella; they reported that they could find no bread,
no meat, no fountains. It was a flat ground of marshes.... with practically no paths, the pilgrims were often up to the knees in
the invading sea sand.’ Quoted from ‘Les Landes – its Forestry Industry: Life before the Forest’ at abelard.org
http://www.abelard.org/france/les_landes_forestry_industry1.php#fever. The area was rife with fever and malaria. In
1927 François Mauriac wrote a novel entitled Thérèse Desqueyroux describing the deprivations of the peasants in the 1890s.
9 Kelly, op. cit., 2001, p. 687.

21