bourgeois
with cousin Alexandre Pau de Saint-Martin; with Joseph Rémond (1826); with history painter Guillaume Lethére
1831-35 – Paris Salon debut in 1831; regular acceptance through 1835
1834 – receives Salon’s third-class medal for Edge of a Clearing, Forest of Compiegne (private collection)
1836-41 – every submission to the Salon rejected by antagonistic juror Jean-Joseph-Xavier Bidauld; Rousseau becomes known as ‘le grand refusé’; exclusion of Rousseau and Delacroix from Salon provokes criticism from Gustave Planche, the Goncourts, and L’Artiste
1842-48 – Rousseau abstains from Salon
1848 – receives French governmentl commission for Edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau, Sunset
1849 – receives Salon’s first-class medal for Avenue of Trees, Forest of l’Isle-Adam, thereby no longer required to submit his work to Salon jury
1852 – receives Cross of the Legion of Honor
1855 –room at Exposition universelle (Paris) devoted to Rousseau
1865 – meetings with Napoleon III resulting in conservation policy protecting Fontainebleau Forest
1867 – elected president of Exposition universelle jury; receives grand medal of honor; initially denied but later receives title of Officer of the Legion of Honor
regular visits to the Forest of Fontainebleau and to Barbizon
Ferdinand-Philippe, Duc d’Orléans; French government
Avenue of Chestnut-trees, 1841 (Louvre, Paris)
Edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau, Sunset, 1848 (Louvre, Paris)
Avenue of Trees, Forest of l’Isle-Adam, 1849 (Musée d’Orsay, Paris)
Rousseau was passionate about nature and felt it both an antidote to and refuge from the modern world:
“[L]et the civilised world go to the devil! Long live nature, forests and ancient poetry!”
Cited in Jean Bouret, L’Ecole de Barbizon et le paysage français au XIXe siècle (Paris: Bibliothèque des arts, 1973), 87.
See Nadar’s portrait of Rousseau
Bouret, Jean. L’Ecole de Barbizon et le paysage français au XIXe siècle. Paris : Bibliothèque des arts, 1973 (in French)
Green, Nicholas. The Spectacle of Nature: Landscape and Bourgeois Culture in Nineteenth-Century France. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993
Thomas, Greg M. Art and Ecology in Nineteenth-Century France: the Landscapes of Theodore Rousseau. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000