Evariste CARPENTIER (1845-1922)

EVARISTE CARPENTIER — Another road towards Impressionism

If Vogels demonstrates one direction in which the liberation of Belgian landscape painting could lead, Carpentier’s intimate Sous-bois au rocher reveals another. Its inscription places the artist at Saint-Pierre-lez-Nemours in 1884, the decisive year in which he temporarily turned away from the commercial success of his Parisian studio and committed himself systematically to painting en plein air. Edmond-Louis De Taeye later recalled that for two seasons Carpentier worked there “du matin au soir”, intoxicated by “sun and freedom”. Yet the resulting painting does not entirely abandon his previous practice. In essence, it resembles the landscape settings of Carpentier's large history paintings translated to an intimate scale and stripped of their figures and narrative: what had formerly provided the setting for human action has become the subject in its own right. An awkwardly dominant trunk interrupts the foreground, rocks lie at either margin, and successive trees recede into an enclosed forest without providing the eye with a picturesque destination. Carpentier's response to nature nevertheless differs fundamentally from Vogels'. His brushwork is remarkably free but remains closely accountable to observation. Rather than allowing landscape to dissolve into autonomous facture, he uses painterly freedom to intensify the specificity of what he sees. Working in France and already deeply receptive to the Naturalism of Jules Bastien-Lepage, Carpentier was absorbing modern developments quite different from the increasingly radical experiments taking place around Vogels in Belgium. He would eventually reconcile these with Impressionism and Luminism without surrendering his descriptive discipline, and later transmit much of this modern French experience to a younger Belgian generation through his teaching at the Liège Academy. Painted in the very year of that transformation, Sous-bois au rocher demonstrates that there was no single road towards Impressionism: modern landscape could emerge from the liberation of paint, but equally from a renewed submission to nature.