This biography from the Archives of AskART:
| Please note: Artists not classified as American in our database may have limited biographical data
compared to the extensive information about American artists.
 The following was written and submitted by Jean Ershler Schatz, artist and researcher from Laguna Woods, California:
Pierre Etienne Theodore Rousseau was born in Paris, France in 1812. He first studied under Saint Martin, Remond and Guillon-Lethiere. The work he exhibited at the Salon in 1834-35 and 1838, showed a surprising deviation from the tastes of the time. The following year his painting was rejected by the Salon because of its lack of Classical interest, and he took himself off to the village of Barbizon in the Fontainebleau Forest, where he worked on the Romantic landscapes which have made him famous.
Rousseau's official success came after the Revolution of 1848. In 1849 his pictures were once more shown in the Salon, and with noteworthy success. He became a central figure of the Barbizon School; during this time he became close friends with Millet. In 1852 he was awarded the Legion of Honor. He painted with an exacting sense of detail and with a minute accuracy which betrayed the influence of the Dutch masters, Ruisdael and Hobbema. Rousseau died in 1867.
Sources include:
Masterpieces of Art, Catalogue of the New York World's Fair 1940
Oxford Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Arts, edited by John Julius Norwich
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Biography from Anderson Galleries, LLC:
| Please note: Artists not classified as American in our database may have limited biographical data
compared to the extensive information about American artists.
Theodore Rousseau was born on April 15, 1812. His parents, who
recognized their son's interest in nature and art and did their best to
encourage it, were part of the rising successful merchant class.
At the age of 13 he was sent to the country, in the Franche-Comte,
where he sketched his surroundings at every opportunity. On his
return to Paris the following year, Rousseau began studying in earnest,
primarily at the studio of Jean Charles Joseph Remond. Even at this
early age, Rousseau made frequent excursions in and around Paris.
Like many Barbizon artists, Rousseau spent a great deal of time in the
Louvre copying the Dutch 17th century landscape artists and traveled to
Fontainebleau.
In 1831, he exhibited his first painting at the
Salon, a landscape from his recent trip to the Auvergne. Rousseau
spent the next year on the Normandy Coast with several other artists,
including Paul Huet, the predominant landscape artist of the time. Huet
exerted a strong influence on Rousseau, and encouraged his young pupil
to draw directly from nature. In 1833, Rousseau received his
first real public recognition through the purchase of a picture at the
Salon by the Duc d'Orleans. Rousseau's greatest involvement with
the Salon occurred between the years of 1834 and 1836. In 1834 he
won a third-class medal, and in 1835 two of Rousseau's sketches were
purchased by the Prince de Joinville. Throughout the rest of the
decade and into the 1840s, he spent a great deal of time traveling in
the French countryside and an increasing part of this time at Barbizon,
often with his closest friend, Jules Dupre. During this time, Rousseau
exhibited frequently at the Salon des Refuses, becoming a well-known
but controversial landscape painter. Rousseau established a
permanent studio at Barbizon in 1848. In June of the following year he
met Millet, who had also moved to Barbizon; this would mark the
beginning of their lasting friendship.
In 1867, at perhaps the
height of his popularity and with the favor of Napoleon III, Rousseau
became the head of an international jury at the Universal
Exhibition. In the same year, a major exhibition of his work was
held, but by this time Rousseau's health was deteriorating rapidly and
Millet cared for him until his death on December 22, 1867.
Museum Collections Include:
Museum
of Amsterdam, Netherlands; Bayonne Museum, France; Beaufort Museum;
Beziers Museum, France; Boston Museum, MA; Museum of Brussels, Belgium;
Chantilly Museum, France; Museum of Copenhagen, Denmark; Detroit
Museum, Michigan; Museum of Dijon, France; Glasgow Museum, Scotland;
Gratz Museum; Le Havre Museum, France; Lille Museum, France; Wallace
Museum, London; Museum of Montpellier, France; Tretiakoff Museum,
Russia; Nantes Museum, France; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York;
Museum of Nice, France; Louvre, Paris; Vire Museum, France |
Biography from South Coast Fine Art:
| Please note: Artists not classified as American in our database may have limited biographical data
compared to the extensive information about American artists.
Born in Paris, Théodore Rousseau seems to have been initially
stimulated to paint landscapes by a cousin. The example of Dutch
painting supplemented the formal instruction that Rousseau received
from minor artists of his own time. A precocious artist who was
painting from nature at the age of 15, he combined an analytical eye
with a romantic heart.
Made controversial by his non-classical
bias, Rousseau was not able to exhibit at the Salon between 1837 and
1847. By that time he had settled at Barbizon, where he exploited
the pictorial and "moral" qualities of oak trees and sunlight. At
the same time, fine drawings such as Country Road with Poplars
(1830-1840) reveal how sensitively he could interpret a flat,
featureless plain like those of Berry, where he worked in the 1840s.
In
spite of the fact that Rousseau did not show at the Salon for many
years, he was widely acclaimed as a landscape artist. In the 1845
Salon the poet and critic Charles Baudelaire even went so far as to
maintain that Rousseau was superior to Camille Corot. In 1864,
however, Baudelaire modified his enthusiasm and remarked that the
artist showed "too much love for detail, not enough for the
architecture of nature."
Luminosity, which Rousseau considered the "great secret" of nature, is very much in evidence as early as 1842, when he painted The Lowland Marsh
in surprisingly high-keyed, dramatically contrasted tones. The
intensity of his response to nature is reflected repeatedly in active,
dynamic scenes such as Storm Effect and Road in the Forest of Fontainebleau (1860-1865).
Rousseau's
fundamentally romantic spirit is well expressed in one of his own
statements: "I also heard the voices of the trees … whose passions I
uncovered. I wanted to talk with them … and put my finger on the secret
of their majesty."
Dependent though he was on Dutch and, to
lesser degree, on English painting, Rousseau was also inspired directly
by nature, as were his successors, the impressionists. Like them,
he put a particular emphasis on light, but on a light that has a more
symbolic and a less naturalistic character.
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