6. Attributed to Theodore Etienne Pierre Rousseau (French, 1812-1867)

Landscape at Sunset.
oil on canvas, signed lower left T. Rousseau, framed.
20" x 26".

8,000/12,000     

Together with Charles Emile Jacque and Jean Francois Millet, Theodore Rousseau was a major figure in the so-called Barbizon School of painters who recorded the idyllic pastoral landscape of the village of Barbizon, a peasant community within the vast forest of Fontainebleau not far from Paris.

This quiet scene of a farmstead nestled within a grove of trees at sunset repeats a composition (which has somewhat smaller dimensions) in the permanent collection of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (inv. no. A 2709) of c. 1857-60 (see Michel Schulman, Theodore Rousseau 1812-1867, Catalogue Raisonne de l'Oeuvre Peint, Paris, 1999, cat. no. 476, p. 261).

Condition: yellowed varnish and surface soil, crazed, minor inpainting in dark areas, relined and with spring stretchers.