Edouard HUBERTI (1818–1880)

EDOUARD HUBERTI — L’Orée

Fourmois’ insistence on drawing as the foundation of landscape remained important to Huberti even as his own temperament developed in a markedly more poetic direction. Huberti was frequently compared with Camille Corot, an affinity he readily acknowledged, calling Corot his “peintre favori” and admiring his ability to interpret nature rather than merely reproduce it. Aside from the Salon painting Saules au bord de l’eau presented nearby, this affinity is particularly apparent in L’Orée, where slender trunks rise from broadly worked masses of foliage into an almost empty sky, their nervous, calligraphic branches directly recalling Corot’s drawings. Yet Huberti’s debt never amounts to imitation: the drawing combines the immediacy of direct observation with remarkable economy, leaving much of the sheet untouched so that the paper itself becomes light and atmosphere. Its title is telling, for Huberti depicts not so much the woodland as its orée— the threshold where the density of the forest gives way to light and open space — transforming an ordinary corner of nature through structure, atmosphere and restraint into something quietly poetic.