Page 27 - Theodore Rousseau: A Magnificent Obsession

Fig. 12 - Ferme près Tartas dans les Landes à Begaar aprés la pluie - Location unknown

composition, placing the two oak trees in the centre left, the steeply receding path towards the
barn in the middle, and the farm house on the right.14 He subsequently extended the
composition’s format horizontally, showing more of the farm house on the right in a full-scale,
grisaille-like oil sketch, now in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek. Copenhagen (Fig. 13).15
Interestingly, while the red-tiled farmhouse is utterly typical of the region, the thatched chaume
is also typical of structures in the Haute-Normandie, such as those depicted in the Frick picture.
Rousseau may have imported this particular structure into his Landais landscape in order to use
its steeply peaked thatched roof, pierced by tiny ventilation ‘dovecotes’, as a means of
dramatically closing off the right-hand side of the composition, concentrating the focus on the
central oak (Fig.14) but at the same time not dissimilar structures could be found in airials. It
might even appear that, contrary to Rousseau’s title, the picture is in effect a ‘portrait’ of

14 Kelly, op. cit., 2001, p. 689, fig. 25. A small, signed plein air oil sketch, oil on paper laid on panel, 7.5 x 11.8 in. / 19 x 30
cm., painted in 1844 entitled Ferme près Tartas dans les Landes à Begaar aprés la pluie, was sold at Phillips London:Tuesday, March
18, 1997, [Lot 47A]. Although the perspective is different, this may well be the same scene as La Ferme from a differing
viewpoint. (Fig. 12).

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