Landscape Study (La Source)

Among the naturalist painters of the Barbizon (the hamlet at the edge of the Fontainbleau forest situated 40 southeast of Paris), Rousseau was perhaps the greatest in talent. He began going to Barbizon in the 1830s and moved there around 1838. This oil study of a rushing spring shows the harsh and varied topography of rock, brush, and water as a set of textures, densities, and incidents of relief. Its close vantage point, indifferent to the motif as a visual ensemble, was likely intended principally for the artist's own use. The growing popularity of depictions of the natural landscape and the taste for intimate, informal sketches, painted en plein air (out-of-doors), made these works increasingly viable for exhibition and for sale.