Narcisse‐Virgilio Diaz de la Peña 1808–1876
NG 2632 
The Storm

Sarah Herring, 2019

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

1871

Oil on wood (probably mahogany), 61.3 × 76.6 cm

Signed bottom left: n. Diaz. 71.

Support

A broken circle is incised on the back of the panel, which is the collector’s mark of a former owner, Alexander Young.¹ There is a seal in black, bottom left, the wrong way up, showing a classical wreathed head in profile (fig. 1). This seal has not been identified, but is possibly that of a former owner, Charles‐Fortunat‐Paul Casimir‐Périer (1812–1897).² Also on the back is a stencil with the number ‘1959, XI [?]’ written in pencil, and ‘C6’ in chalk.

Materials and Technique

The panel was first prepared with a double white ground consisting of lead white with silicate and barium sulphate extenders. On top of this white ground is a secondary translucent white ground (or priming layer) composed of zinc white with a little lead white added.

Extensive incising in the form of broad grooves in a band about one quarter of the way up and beneath the paint surface probably indicate indicates the outlines of an earlier composition. The grooves, which have tree‐like structures, suggest that the ground was incised with a tool such as a stylus in marking out the design.

Additionally, many of the samples, when viewed in cross‐section, demonstrate multi‐layered structures of varying colours. Although this is typical for Diaz, who tended to rework his paintings, some of these layers may represent an underlying composition. For example, all samples from the sky paint show green underlayers, which have no explicable relation to the sky. These green underlayers are often followed by a creamy white layer before the final dark purplish‐grey sky paint has been added. The green underlayers tend to consist of mixtures of the modern pigments emerald green, viridian and chrome yellow, among several other more traditional pigments such as earth colours and Prussian blue. The dark grey‐blue and purplish‐grey sky is created using mixtures of cobalt blue with varying proportions of lead white, ivory black, earths, and what appears to be a faded madder‐type red lake. This fading suggests the sky may have once had a more purplish hue.

Analysis of the paint media identified heat‐bodied walnut oil as the binder in paint from both the yellow impasto of the path and the olive green grass on the left edge. The grass also contained fir balsam and traces of a copal resin.³

Conservation and Condition

NG 2632 was cleaned and restored in 1977. There are white shrinkage cracks in all areas of the picture, which were touched out during restoration. Some of the dark areas are quite worn.

Discussion

Like much of his late work, this painting, from the end of the artist’s career, shows a strong feeling for natural and dramatic effects. The view is across the desolate heathlands near the village of Barbizon, with rocky outcrops in the scrub and a few sparse trees, including a prominent one on the right. A path runs through the plain, leading the eye into the composition. To the right of the path a man carrying a gun and accompanied by two dogs is painted almost entirely in monochrome, emphasising his vulnerability in the face of nature’s forces. The stormy sky breaks at the centre to show patches of blue and whiter clouds.

Diaz has adapted his brushstrokes to the drama of the scene. The landscape is painted in short, choppy, horizontal and diagonal strokes, whereas the treatment of the sky, with multi‐directional and expansive brushwork, echoes the stormy weather it describes. The brushwork of the sky where it meets the horizon, particularly in the centre of the picture, is strongly vertical, the short strokes brought down over the tops of the bushes marking the extent of the landscape, perhaps suggesting rainfall.

NG 2632 forms part of a group of paintings in which lone figures, usually hunters, are depicted at the mercy of nature. The painting is particularly closely related to Storm, Figure on a Path in the Jean‐de‐Paris (1871), which features identical trees on the right, a lone figure, and similar disposition of the clouds and path.⁴ A further painting, The Hunter (1871; fig. 2) , is also compositionally close, with stormy sky, path leading into the landscape and trees to the right, in this case both multiplied in number and set further to the front.⁵

Additional pictures, while not so close compositionally, share the atmosphere of bleak landscapes beneath stormy skies.⁶ In The Storm of 1872 (fig. 3), trees are arranged on the left and there is no path running through the composition. Instead the middle ground is illuminated by light streaming through the break in the clouds. The hunter is set at the edge of this lit‐up area, a lone figure viewed in silhouette [page 344] and, like the figure in NG 2632, painted in monochrome. In tone and colour the two pictures are very closely related, especially in the pervading dark greys of the sky, the lighter clouds at the centre and the dark greens of the landscape. There are also similar vertical strokes in the sky where it meets the horizon. Brettell and Eisenmann Eisenman compare NG 2632 to The Approaching Storm of 1870 (Pasadena, Norton Simon Museum).⁷ The treatment of the sky is similar in both, with the clouds breaking up to reveal blue sky at the centre. However, the Norton Simon picture depicts a rocky slope with a pool in the foreground. A similar twisted tree stands to the right, but it is more in the foreground and more detailed in execution, with its coppery foliage catching the light breaking through the clouds at centre.⁸

Provenance

NG 2632 may be the picture lent by Boucheron to the Diaz exhibition at the Ecole des Beaux‐Arts, Paris, 1877;⁹ in the collection of Charles‐Fortunat‐Paul Casimir‐Périer (1812–1897) in 1892;¹⁰ in the collection of Alexander Young (1828–1907) by 1898, when loaned to the Guildhall exhibition; sold by Young with the rest of his collection to Agnew’s in 1906; bought from Agnew’s by George Salting (1835–1909), 1907;¹¹ placed on loan to the National Gallery, 1907; Salting Bequest 1910.

Former Owners: Boucheron and Casimir‐Périer

Boucheron must be identified as the jeweller Frédéric Boucheron (1830–1902), who opened his first boutique in the Palais Royal in 1858, moving to the place Vendôme in 1893.¹² Charles‐Fortunat‐Paul Casimir‐Périer was the son of Casimir‐Pierre Périer (1777–1832), a banker and minister of the interior under Louis‐Philippe. Paul Casimir‐Périer was also a banker, and a serious amateur photographer who was a founding member of the Société française de photographie.¹³

Exhibitions

Possibly Paris 1877 (28, L’Orage, dated 1871), lent by Boucheron; Paris 1892 (72), lent by M. Paul Casimir‐Périer; London 1898 (105), lent by Alexander Young; Glasgow 1901 (1402), lent by Alexander Young; London 1910b (not numbered); Portsmouth, Nottingham, Stoke‐on‐Trent, Barnard Castle and London 1980 (6); London 1986 (not numbered); Lyons 2002 (50); Washington and Houston 2008 (97); London 2009 (31 in accompanying book). On long‐term loan from George Salting to the National Gallery from 1907 to 1910; long‐term loan to Manchester City Art Gallery from unknown date to October 1919 ; long‐term loan to the Arts Council of Great Britain, Scarborough Art Gallery, from May 1952 to May 1954 .

Literature

Burlington Magazine, LXIII, 1908, p. 340; Davies and Gould 1970, p. 61; Johnston 1982, p. 64; White, Pilc and Kirby 1998, pp. 83 and 93; Roy 1999, pp. 335, 336; Pomarède 2002, no. 50 and p. 201; Brettell and Eisenmann Eisenman 2006, p. 126; Miquel 2006, I, illustrated p. 165; II, p. 240, no. 1526.

Notes