Trees, Ile de Croissy (ébauche)

When Rousseau began renting a house in Barbizon in the summer or fall of 1847, he was settling into an ordinary agricultural village no bigger than Bégaar where farmers and peasants went about their daily labor...

The nineteenth century is characterised in art histories as an era of innovation: in the production of the artist’s materials, in their usage and in the ‘modern’ styles of painting they generated. Science and technology provided painters with a greatly extended range of artists’ materials and pigments, and colour-merchants retailed a burgeoning selection of ready-made...