Théodore FOURMOIS (1814–1871)

THÉODORE FOURMOIS — En Dauphiné, c. 1845–46

Travel was fundamental to Théodore Fourmois' development as a landscape painter, allowing him to exchange the conventions of academic landscape for direct experience of nature. Painted en plein airduring an early journey through the Dauphiné around 1845–46, this small oil on paper has all the immediacy of a work made before the motif: a seated peasant girl and grazing animal are dwarfed by an enormous boulder, while beyond them the landscape rapidly opens towards distant mountains, translated into broad zones of colour beneath a swiftly brushed sky. Yet such studies were by no means regarded as merely preparatory. Fourmois' posthumous studio sale of 1872 contained 147 études terminées, explicitly described as mounted on canvas and framed; most of them, the catalogue observed, could pass for “little paintings”. The present work preserves precisely this transformation from travelling sketch into autonomous object: its fragile paper support was mounted on canvas and placed in an extraordinarily sumptuous contemporary gilt frame, whose expense provides a striking material measure of the value already attached to Fourmois' apparently spontaneous encounters with nature.