Théodore Rousseau

(French, 1812–1867)

Théodore Rousseau was a French artist and one of the leading figures in the Barbizon School, alongside Jean-François Millet and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot. Staging himself in rural landscapes around France, Rousseau depicted brooding scenes such as The Forest in Winter at Sunset (1846-1867), with a range of brushstrokes and tonal colors. “It is better in art to be honest than clever,” he once remarked. Born Pierre-Étienne-Théodore Rousseau on April 15, 1812 in Paris, France, he began to paint as a teenager and later studied under Neoclassical artists. Despite his training, he based much of his style on the 17th-century Dutch landscape painters Jacob van Ruisdael and Meindert Hobbema. Beginning to work en plein air during the 1820s, Rousseau first travelled to the Forest of Fontainebleau southeast of Paris in 1833. He settled in Barbizon, a village on the outskirts of the forest, the artist began working alongside Corot, Charles-François Daubigny, Narcisse-Virgile Diaz de La Peña, and Millet. Throughout the subsequent years, Rousseau had a contentious relationship with the Paris Salon which often rejected his works. Along with the rest of the Barbizon School, Rousseau’s work had a profound impact on the development of the generation of painters who became the Impressionists. The artist died on December 22, 1867 in Barbizon, France. Today, his works are held in the collections of the Louvre Museum in Paris, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, among others.