Narcisse‐Virgilio Diaz de la Peña 1808–1876
NG 2058 
Sunny Days in the Forest

Sarah Herring, 2019

Extracted from:
Sarah Herring, The Nineteenth Century French Paintings (London: National Gallery Company and Yale University Press, 2019).

1850–60

Oil on canvas, 39 × 56.2 cm

Signed bottom right: n. Diaz.

Support

The original support is a very fine weave canvas. It has been lined, and the original tacking edges are now missing. The stretcher is old but not necessarily original. On the back is a stencil with an asterisk over ‘930’, and a number in pencil, ‘2654’, crossed out.

Materials and Technique

In several areas of the composition an initial peach‐coloured layer can be seen. This is probably the ground colour and may have been applied by the artist. The layer contains lead white extended with a little barium sulphate and aluminium silicates and tinted with red earth, ivory black and a little yellow earth.

As is typical of Diaz’s painting practice NG 2058 has a fairly complex layer structure, and cross‐sections taken at various points show multiple layers. One sample, taken from the sky, reveals on top of the peach‐coloured ground, layers of grey, pale blue, grey‐brown and cream, with the upper paint layer containing lead white mixed with a little cobalt blue and red lake. The array of verdant colours used to depict the lush foliage in the foreground is created with several layers of mixed greens. A sample from the dark green foreground at the bottom right edge reveals three layers: first an underlayer of dull green containing a rich yellow‐orange earth with viridian; then a layer of bright yellow‐green composed primarily of emerald green with yellow earth and lead white; and a final layer of translucent dark green composed almost entirely of viridian with Indian yellow. In a further sample of bright green paint from the central foreground the layers of mixed greens are similar in composition but appear in a different order, with the brightest yellow‐green as the final paint layer. The trees are also painted with similar green paint mixtures, with some of the final yellow‐orange highlights consisting largely of the translucent pigment Indian yellow combined with a little emerald green.

Medium analysis of paint from areas of sky, water and brown‐green foliage (lower right‐hand edge) identified the binder as walnut oil in all cases. The white impasto paint in the water was heat‐bodied and contained additional traces of copal resin. The dark brown‐green was also heat‐bodied and included moderate amounts of fir balsam.¹

The laboured surface has a degree of impasto, especially in the foliage of the trees, which is perhaps the result of emulating Dutch seventeenth‐century landscapes, such as those by Jacob van Ruisdael (1628–1682).² While acknowledging that Diaz’s technique could vary widely, Silvestre commented on his use of impasto: He employs pigments in their pure state, that is without diluting them in oil, which he fears would have a bad effect on the future of the painting. He makes exaggerated use of impasto and scumbling, scarcely blends his tones for fear of lessening their intensity, and breaks them up into infinitesimal particles, closely juxtaposed on the canvas …³ The trees are built up from dark to light, giving depth and three‐dimensionality. The two foremost, and particularly the largest and nearest, have foliage picked out in very light greens, beiges and creams, and on the left in yellows and oranges in each case. The trunks are also highlighted on the left side with cream. The numerous touches of light paint denoting the foliage give s an effect of dancing light. The groups of trees to either side are dealt with in a more perfunctory manner, blocked in with strokes of green with just touches of lighter green on the left edges. The trees are painted over the sky, and subsequently the artist has fragmented the greens of the foliage with final strokes and touches in a substantial blue paint to create a more dappled appearance.

Conservation and Condition

NG 2058 was cleaned in 2001, when a thick yellow varnish and old retouchings were removed, and losses reintegrated. Although generally intact, the paint and ground layers have been significantly affected by an early lining process; the canvas weave is now more prominent than it would have been initially, and the impastoed areas of paint appear somewhat flattened. There are a few small losses.

Discussion

Two women gather sticks by a watery clearing in front of a group of trees. The figure on the left is set in the middle ground; she wears a grey skirt and black apron, white blouse and cap, and a red shawl. The other woman, in dark blue skirt, black top and white cap, stands on the right and further back, behind the water. The trees are arranged in an arc, with the most prominent left of centre and the others set further back on each side. This composition was one used by Diaz in numerous canvases. In The Pool, called the Edge of the Forest (1843; fig. 1)⁴ the grouping of trees, with one prominent specimen standing a little forward, is very closely related to NG 2058, as is the way in which the group is flanked on either side by two smaller trees placed further back. Common also to both are the foreground pool of water and rocky landscape. A Pool in a Meadow (1873; fig. 2)⁵ is another example that can be associated with this group, although here the trees are set further back, behind an expansive foreground, and more in a line, with one prominent tree in the centre. The bowed figure of a peasant woman trudges along in the middle ground. A closely related composition, Wood Gatherer near the Mare aux Vipères (1862; fig. 3), again shares the foreground pool and screen of trees in the background, with one prominent trunk standing a little to the fore.⁶

All commentators agree that the composition of NG 2058 shows the influence of Théodore Rousseau, who was of great importance to Diaz’s development as a landscape [page 334] painter (see p. 324). G.M. Thomas compares the composition of NG 2058 to the familiar Rousseau composition of a grove of trees, but notes that unlike Rousseau’s, Diaz’s figures seem arbitrarily positioned. He also contrasts Diaz’s treatment of the women with Millet, with whom he did not share an interest in the social and political implications of wood‐gathering, rather ‘the picturesque artifice of the woman posed at the left suggests that Diaz was using her the way he used female gypsies and nymphs – to provide a bit of colour and carefree action in order to enliven the sparkling landscape’.⁷ It is certainly the case that the more prominent woman’s red shawl and white headscarf add notes of colour to the landscape in the same manner as the red caps of Corot’s figures of boatmen and herdsmen. Thomas further makes the [page 335] [page [336]] point that, according to restrictions reinstated in 1848–9, the gathering of wood by poor women and children was only allowed from December to February, whereas the season depicted here is spring or possibly autumn, but decidedly not winter. Claudia Denk more specifically compares NG 2058 with Rousseau’s The Pond (fig. 5), which he began in the hamlet of Fay in Berry in 1842 and finished in 1843 in Paris.⁸ Rousseau’s painting has more of a feeling of space and open landscape, with a flat plain extending off into the distance behind the trees, which form a more spacious line than those in NG 2058. A peasant woman sits at the edge of the water in the foreground, a solitary figure with a rather melancholy, pensive air. She has none of the activity of Diaz’s figures, who, even if they are not technically meant to be gathering wood out of season, do have a function within the forest setting and are perhaps not as arbitrarily positioned as Thomas suggests.

Provenance

Miquel notes that NG 2058 was in the collection of Diaz’s friend and pupil Léon Richet (1847–1907);⁹ according to a letter of 16 April 1906 from William Hartree, brother of Charles, NG 2058 was formerly in the collection of the Duke of Saxe‐Coburg.¹⁰ While Martin Davies identifies this as Alfred (1844–1900), second son of Queen Victoria, Duke of Edinburgh, and from 1893 Duke of Saxe‐Coburg and Gotha, it actually appears to be his uncle, Ernest II (1818–1893), Duke of Saxe‐Coburg and Gotha, brother of Albert, Prince Consort, who owned the painting; prior to his ownership NG 2058 appears to have passed through the hands of the dealer Charles Sedelmeyer (1837–1925). Lot 35 of the Sedelmeyer sale Vente Sedelmeyer comprenant tableaux modernes des écoles françaises et étrangères joints à ceux des Galeries de San Donato et de San Martino, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, 30 April to 2 May 1877 (from the Sedelmeyer section) was a painting whose title and dimensions suggest that it is almost certainly NG 2058: Diaz, Bouquet d’arbres au bord d’une mare (40 × 57 cm).¹¹ It was bought by Goupil, who in turn sold it on 5 November 1877 to Ernest II, Duke of Saxe‐Coburg;¹² in the collection of Charles Hartree (probably 1851–1906) of Wilton Place, Knightsbridge, and Tunbridge Wells;¹³ presented by the executors of Charles Hartree in accordance with his wishes, 1906; for a time at the Tate Gallery; transferred in 1956.

Exhibitions

London 1974b (39); Portsmouth, Nottingham, Stoke‐on‐Trent, Barnard Castle and London 1980 (9); Munich 1996 (B74); Barnard Castle 2002–3 (not numbered); London 2009 (23 in accompanying book). On long‐term loan to the Arts Council of Great Britain, Castle Museum, Norwich, from May 1958 to February 1963 .

Literature

Burlington Magazine, 1908, p. 340; Davies and Gould 1970, p. 61; White, Pilc and Kirby 1998, pp. 83 and 93; Roy 1999, p. 335; Thomas 2000, pp. 67–8 and 162; Miquel 2006, II, p. 168, no. 1093.¹⁴

Notes