Unruly nature

Scott Allan, Édouard Kopp

The landscape painting of Théodore Rousseau (1812-1867) was greatly esteemed in the decades after his death, but came to be underappreciated as tastes shifted in the early twentieth century. Today there still persists the sense that his pictures are retrograde, nostalgic, and traditional. The exhibition "Unruly Nature: The Landscapes of Théodore Rousseau" challenges this view, highlighting the tremendous shifts in motif, mood, style, and technique that Rousseau's oeuvre underwent between the late 1820s and the 1860s, thereby conveying a sense of the artist's restlessness as he attempted to formulate new vocabularies of landscape expression with all of the graphic and painterly means at his disposal.