Sur le Motif: Painting in Nature around 1800

Abstract

The years around 1800 mark a specific moment in European art history when landscape painting underwent important ideological and aesthetic changes—changes which up until recently have not been sufficiently investigated.1 With the long-awaited establish ment of a special Prix de Rome for historical landscape came official recognition of the genre by the Academy.2 At the same time, a golden age for outdoor painting began; the practice sur le motz/rapidly caught on among artists all over Europe. Setting themselves up in the Italian countryside, first in the rural surroundings of Rome (the Sabine mountains and the Alban hills) but later also in the south near Naples and Sicily, landscape painters delineated the picturesque views and the atmospheric conditions of the surroundings in oil sketches and drawings.3 Even after returning to their homelands, landscapists contin ued to paint outdoors, exploring their native forests, mountains, and coasts. The school of Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes drew high acclaim in the first half of the nineteenth century; however, with the success of realism first with the Barbizon school and later with the victorious march of impressionism, art historians soon rejected the official neoclassical landscape as a cold imitation of nature, with Charles Blanc criti cizing that these painters only know the classical earth of Minerva.4 However, the paint ing View in the Ile-de-France by Jean-Victor Bertin, recently acquired by the J. Paul Getty Museum, and an album of drawings by Antoine-Laurent Castellan, recently acquired by the Getty Research Institute, illustrate the different tendencies that coexisted in land scape painting in the early nineteenth century. These two works reflect the variety of the genre, from highly finished ideal landscapes destined for the Salon to oil sketches painted on the spot for the artist's own private pleasure and use in his studio. View in the Ile-de France illustrates the difficulty of characterizing paintings that fall somewhere in between these two categories, raising the question of whether these works are preparatory stud ies or finished works of art. Although they were called sketches, these paintings were not done entirely in nature; rather they were started en plein air and finished later in the art ist's studio. The change in the status of oil sketches took place slowly and did not come as a sudden artistic revolution. For the generation of neoclassical landscapists around 1800, painting in nature was a consistent part of their work; however, they kept these oil sketches in their studio, showing them to students and colleagues, while presenting fin ished, recomposed landscapes to the public and to critics at the Salon.5 When considered