Valenciennes, Daubigny, and the Origins of French Landscape Painting
64 pages | 30 color/38 b&w illustrations | 11 x 8.5 | 2004
Cloth edition is not available
ISBN 978-0-9721222-0-7 | paper: $20.00 sh
"Though one may stay in Rome for many years, finally one has to return home." —Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes
French painters have historically taken to landscape with a zeal unmatched by artists of any other nationality. This volume traces the history of that engagement with nature from the late Renaissance, when landscape painting first emerged from the background of narrative representation, up to the eve of Impressionism in the nineteenth century. French artists faced many choices as they made their way through the rural landscape. John VarrianoÁs essay emphasizes the role the classicizing Italianate idiom of Poussin and Claude played in the French imagination for much of that time. Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes, who was for landscape painting what Jacques-Louis David was for history painting, constitutes a major turning point in that tradition. Wendy WatsonÁs essay explores the intellectual foundations of his work and his renewal of the classical legacy in landscape painting.
With time, French landscape painters came to question the authority of the inherited tradition. Michael MarlaisÁs essay not only demonstrates that Charles-Fran¬ois Daubigny was central to that conceptual change but also explains the reasons artists began rethinking, while not totally abandoning, classical formulas.
Valenciennes, Daubigny, and the Origins of French Landscape Painting contains 30 color illustrations as well as a checklist of the 2004 exhibition at the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum that occasioned its publication.
Michael Marlais is the James M. Gillespie Professor of Art History at Colby College. He is the author of Conservative Echoes in Fin-de-Si“cle Parisian Art Criticism (Penn State, 1992).
John Varriano is the Idella Plimpton Kendall Professor of Art History at Mount Holyoke College. He is the author of Italian Baroque and Rococo Architecture (1986), Rome, A Literary Companion (1991), and Caravaggio and the Art of Realism (forthcoming, Penn State).
Wendy M. Watson is curator of the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum. She is the author of Italian Renaissance Maiolica from the William A. Clark Collection (1986), Italian Renaissance Ceramics from the Howard I. and Janet H. Stein Collection and the Philadelphia Museum of Art (2001), and the co-author of Summit: Vittorio Sella, Mountaineer and Photographer, The Years 1879å1909 (1999)."
Foreword
Marianne Doezema
Landscape Painting Before Valenciennes
John Varriano
Tradition and Innovation: Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes
and the Neoclassical Landscape
Wendy M. Watson
Charles-Francois Daubigny and the Traditions
of French Landscape Painting
Michael Marlais
Exhibition Checklist
Photograph Credits