Paul Huet 1803–1869
NG 6603 
Trees in the Park at Saint‐Cloud

Sarah Herring, 2019

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

Probably 1850s

Oil on canvas, 37.5 × 55.2 cm¹

Support

The canvas is in its original state, untrimmed and unlined. There is no priming on the turnover edges, suggesting that it is not a pre‐primed canvas. There are some lumps of paint present on the turnovers.

The beginnings of a number ‘15…’ or ‘65…’ are written on a fragment of a paper label at top left (fig. 1). A small label of the same type (with the number ‘550’) is located in the top left corner of The Aqueduct at Marly (fig. 2). These labels were presumably added by the family.

The following inscriptions and numbers are written on the stretcher: ‘Paul Huet 1803–1869 / Frondaison d’octobre / parc de St. Cloud / (peinture d’après nature / (1820)’ (fig. 3); ‘PERRET‐CERNOT’; ‘48’ in yellow chalk on centre bar and in biro on label; ‘K7018032’ in yellow chalk on side stretcher bar; ‘Paul Huet’ in blue crayon on the top bar and ‘1820’ in ink. A label on the back reads: ‘BOW STOCK NO 12 / HUET’ (this last possibly referring to a gallery’s stock).

Materials and Technique

The off‐white priming, which is likely to have been applied by the artist, is composed of lead white extended with the mineral form of barium sulphate (barytes), with the addition of small amounts of bone black and earth pigments. The priming has been subjected to somewhat rough treatment prior to painting, and the scratches and minor damages visible on the unpainted right side are also present under the paint surface, visible even to the naked eye at the base of the tree (11.5 cm from the right‐hand edge). The artist has overlaid these scratches with light brown paint in an attempt to disguise them. The cause of this scratching is not clear, but it might have occurred when the canvas was being transported for painting en plein air.² There are thin orange/brown lines visible under the central, tallest tree, which presumably served as a cursory form of underdrawing. There is a warm brown underlayer applied under the central area, perhaps to make this area appear denser, whereas the peripheral trees are painted directly on to the white priming.

The paint layer structure is relatively simple, with one or two layers present and some wet‐in‐wet mixing of different colours evident. A sample of paint from the blue sky along the top edge shows a simple structure of thick off‐white ground followed by a single layer of bright blue paint (lead white, cobalt blue and Prussian blue). However, in other areas the artist has made use of a second modulating layer (yellow and brown lakes and earths) to dull down the more vibrant underlying colours.

The foliage on the far left tree was painted by applying two green layers over the off‐white ground. The lower layer is a dark green mixture comprising Prussian blue, yellow and orange earth, chrome yellow, a brown‐yellow lake, a pale yellow lake and a little bone/ivory black. The uppermost layer represents a highlight in the foliage in a brighter yellow‐green hue composed of chrome yellow, Indian yellow, cobalt blue (or possibly smalt) and a little orange and red earth.

Several passages of paint (for example the mid‐olive green from the tree at the left edge and the opaque orange over the dark brown glaze at the bottom edge of the grey foreground) contain cadmium‐based yellow and/or orange. NG 6603 has been traditionally dated to 1820, but if this date is accepted then the presence of cadmium would represent exceptionally early use.³ The element cadmium was discovered in 1817 by Friedrich Stromeyer (1776–1835) (based in Gottingen), and in 1819 he suggests its use as a pigment in the form of cadmium sulphide: ‘This sulphuret, from its beauty and the fixity of its colour, as well as from the property it possesses of uniting well with other colours, and especially with blue, promises to be useful in painting: some experiments undertaken to this end have given the most pleasing results’.⁴ It is reasonable to assume that these experiments took place in Germany, and in 1830 Merimée, who writes of the rarity of cadmium in France, affirms that ‘the sulphuret of cadmium [cadmium sulphide] is, we are assured, already used in Germany, and here it is to be found with the principal manufacturers of chemical products’.⁵ The scarcity of cadmium metal, to which he alludes, prohibited mass production even after commercialisation in the 1840s, and it remained very expensive for much of the nineteenth century.⁶ Taking all this into account, while it is of great interest that cadmium yellow has been found on a painting dated 1823 by the German artist Heinrich Maria Hess, Portrait of Bertel Thorvaldsen (Munich, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen), it is safe to conclude (pending further welcome research into the early use of cadmium pigments) that it is fairly unlikely that cadmium yellow or orange would be found on a French painting dated to 1820 (or even the 1820s).⁷ For a further discussion of the dating, including a tentative re‐dating to the 1850s, see below.

Medium analysis has identified heat‐bodied linseed oil as the binder in the exposed ground layer, as well as in the blue sky and the green foliage paints.

In general the picture is painted with speed and fluidity, with a quantity of wet‐in‐wet painting, impasto and painterly effects such as the use of the handle end of the brush to create the effect of leaves. The brushwork becomes increasingly vigorous towards the unfinished right‐hand side, where Huet concluded the study with a few calligraphic swirls and loops of paint. It is possible that the area of unpainted white priming on the far right represents a reserve for a further tall tree that was never completed, and it is interesting to note that the lines of brushstrokes finish fairly abruptly, as if on an invisible line. On the left side of the picture the trees are carefully finished. Huet has paid particular attention to the play of the branches and the manner in which they overlie each other as they spread out horizontally from the trunk. He has used small, careful touches of light green, which become increasingly lighter and more yellowy in tone higher up the trees as the foliage catches more of the sunlight. At the top the brushwork becomes looser and more vertical, with a thin brown used for the trunks and branches. The tallest tree is also fairly loosely painted, with thin, leafless branches, some [page 363] ending in mid‐air. At the right the unfinished tree is painted with a swirl of thin olive‐green paint, on top of which are laid a much lighter green and long strokes of dark green. On the left the trees were painted before the sky (which overlaps their edges), whereas in the centre and on the right the trees were painted on top of the sky. X‐radiography reveals that the gap between the trees at the right was originally lower and wider, with the sky extending further down behind the bushes on the right.

Conservation and Condition

The paint is in very good, original condition, apart from some minor scuffs around the edges and some tiny losses at the left. There is slight surface dirt, and the exposed ground has suffered considerable abrasion. Both the back and edges are covered in what are probably mould spots. Lastly, of great interest to the historian of painting in the open air, a small horizontal drip on the far right side can be identified as a bird dropping (fig. 4), which must have happened when Huet was carrying the canvas or had placed it against a tree on its side (in portrait format).

Discussion

A wide sandy path leads from the front edge directly into a wooded park. On the left it is bordered with an orderly row of trees, with a grassy area and further trees hinted at behind. In the middle a particularly tall tree is cut off by the top edge. On the right of the path, which is more sketchily painted, the grass and a tree are left unfinished, the latter painted over with a milky‐grey paint, obliterating the foliage underneath. At the centre, to the right of the serried row of five brown trunks, the white jet of a fountain is visible under the trees, with a few scattered marks in white and light‐coloured paint presumably standing for figures. Although the inscription on the stretcher, ‘Frondaison d’octobre’, refers to October or autumnal foliage, in fact there is no suggestion of the leaves turning, and the range of greens, which vary from dark to light yellow‐green, can be described as fresh and vibrant.

The inscription on the back, while dating the painting to 1820, also identifies it as a view of the park at Saint‐Cloud. From 1819 to 1822, while Huet was studying in the studio of Antoine‐Jean (Baron) Gros (1771–1835), he was also painting independently in areas to the west of Paris, in particular around the Pont de Sèvres, the Ile Séguin and in the park of Saint‐Cloud. At that period the extensive park housed the château de Saint‐Cloud. The original structure, the hôtel d’Aulnay, was offered to Jérôme de Gondi (1550–1604), member of a Florentine banking family, by Catherine de’ Medici (1519–1589) in 1577. In 1658 Louis XIV bought the house for his brother Philippe (1640–1701), the future duc d’Orléans, and between 1670 and 1690 the great landscape architect André le Nôtre (1613–1700) laid out a park covering nearly 460 hectares as a formal garden leading down to the Seine. Although the chateau was destroyed by fire in 1870 during the Franco‐Prussian war, the park still retains its ornamental lakes and fountains, of which the most famous are the ‘Grande Cascade’ and the ‘Grand Jet’, the latter a single jet of water whose height was described by Le Rouge in 1771 as surpassing that of even the tallest tree of the garden.⁸ Huet painted a number of views of the park, to which he was evidently emotionally attached, describing it as ‘this enchanted site … whose every bush I knew, where I cried for every tree cut down, as I would for a lost friend’.⁹ Many of his views portray the elms that were a feature of the gardens.

The territory Le Nôtre had to work on was extensive (Philippe, on his acquisition of Saint‐Cloud, had extended the grounds in all directions) and already heavily wooded.¹⁰ But it was also fashionable in the seventeenth century to plant the far reaches of parks densely with trees of medium and high height, to give an impression of untamed nature, even if the woods were tightly controlled by human hand. More elaborate structures were groves or copses, run through with carefully laid out paths or avenues, and composed predominantly of limes, horse‐chestnuts and above all elms, all preferred because of their good growing properties.¹¹ An avenue of elms is mentioned by Le Rouge in his description of 1771; how the garden is separated from the place d’Orléans by an iron grill with two doors, through one of which the visitor approaches the front courtyard of the chateau ‘through a long avenue of elms and palisades of arbours.’¹² Elsewhere he describes the lower gardens, which ran along the river, as ornamented with enclosures and groves, ponds, by jets of water of an amazing height, and above all by the grand Cascades.¹³ It is probable that the view here is of one of the avenues created by Le Nôtre in the upper or lower gardens, the latter if it is the Grand Jet glimpsed through the trees. It is also reasonable to identify the tall trees on the left and centre as elms.

Huet’s views of the park broadly fall into two groups, the first of which, dating from the early 1820s, is centred around The Elms of Saint‐Cloud of 1823 (fig. 5). This has an open composition with the sky visible between the trees, which are closely studied, with many individual branches delineated, including some quite jagged and crooked specimens. The handling is loose and the brushwork fluid, with thin application of paint combined with more detailed [page [364]] [page [365]] [page 366] highlighting of foliage. The dark greens painted in a fluid paint and the disposition of the branches criss‐crossing the tree, including the forked bare branches to the left, are features not only of The Elms of Saint‐Cloud but also other paintings by Huet from the period: Landscape in the Forest at Compiègne (fig. 6), a dark scene of a forest interior fluidly painted in different shades of dark greens, and The Forest of Compiègne (about 1830; Boston, Museum of Fine Arts), a series of five oil sketches, all painted in fluid and blended brushwork using dark tones.¹⁴ There are a number of studies for the Petit Palais painting, of which The Elms of Saint‐Cloud shares with the painting a crooked trunk cutting across the picture surface.¹⁵ In a further study entitled The Elms of Saint‐Cloud (about 1823; private collection), this trunk extends from bottom left to top right, cutting diagonally across the picture surface. Foliage painted in calligraphic swirls and curls of paint in light blue‐greens is laid over darker paint of trunks set further back.¹⁶ Characteristic of Huet’s studies is the row of tree trunks present in The Elms at Saint‐Cloud; serried trunks are also present on the right of the early The [page 367] Ile Séguin with Trees and the House of the Lelièvre Family (fig. 7) – and are also a feature of NG 6603, as noted above.

The second group of views by Huet, painted during the 1820s and 1830s, feature a backdrop of a particularly dense frieze of trees, massive, dark and impenetrable, with only the occasional treetop breaking away from the others at the very summit. In Autumn Evening in the Park of Saint‐Cloud (fig. 8), a thickly and darkly painted study (but with small brushstrokes) for the painting exhibited at the Salon of 1835, a dense tall bank of trees dwarfs and encloses the foreground and its grazing cows. Similarly, in The Park of Saint‐Cloud on a Festival Day of 1829 (Paris, Louvre), the festival goers appear miniature in comparison with the trees. The Elm Avenue in the Park of Saint‐Cloud (about 1822) is close in composition to both the above, featuring a massive bank of trees and a few scattered figures in front picked out in light colours.¹⁷ A similar tall bank of trees dwarfs and encloses the foreground in The Undergrowth (fig. 9), and to a lesser extent in Edge of the Wood in Saint‐Cloud (fig. 10). In all of these the trees form a dense and impenetrable wall of foliage, fronting a dark and mysterious interior, compositionally very different from NG 6603.¹⁸

Both groups of paintings of the park reveal that Huet exaggerated the height of his trees. This tendency was noted by Burty in 1869, writing of the sketch Edge of the Wood in the Forest of Saint‐Cloud: The trees are long, even too long, like these Renaissance figures who include too large a number of ‘heads’. This exaggeration in the slenderness of the trunks, in the lengthening of the branches, or in the height of the walls of foliage is characteristic of the work of Paul Huet: the elms start to resemble the Italian pines painted by Watteau. But if he made them too tall, he made them poetic; others, painting now, see them more exactly, but they make them ordinary.¹⁹

Burty also writes: He had one of those hyper‐sensitive natures that the frigus opacum of the great woods fills with a sacred terror, that the approach of a storm set his nerves on edge, overcome, or overexcites to the point of neurosis. The ‘effects’ found in nature struck him profoundly. He willingly exaggerated them.²⁰ In NG 6603 the tall tree at the centre, the small figures dotted under the trees, the row of trunks and the glimpse of the fountain all point to its being a view of the park at Saint‐Cloud. Yet in many respects, while keeping in mind that it is very much a study – and unfinished – it stands apart from the two groups of views described above, differing in both composition and, more importantly, coloration. It does share common features with the Petit Palais painting (fig. 5), including the positioning of the trees (particularly the tall tree at the centre of NG 6603, which is the closest in handling to those in the Petit Palais painting); the sense, although considerably diluted, of the dense clumps of trees from which taller trees emerge; and the fluid brown paint used to define the smaller branches. Further, the unfinished right side of NG 6603 is probably a reserve left for further upright trees, very similar to the right‐hand side of the Petit [page 368] [page 369] Palais painting. However, in general appearance the two are not closely related; the colours, particularly the greens, of the Petit Palais painting are much darker than in NG 6603, where a much wider range of bright, saturated greens is used. And while the foliage is more densely painted in NG 6603, it lacks the impasto highlights of the Petit Palais version – although this, of course, may be a function of its unfinished nature.

If the colours of NG 6603 are much brighter and the brushwork denser than those of the first group, neither does it share the imposing wall of trees and brooding tonality of the second. Comparison with other early paintings also serves to highlight differences in both handling and coloration. Of the paintings cited above, The Ile Séguin with Trees and the House of the Lelièvre Family (fig. 7), Edge of the Wood in Saint‐Cloud (fig. 10) and also The Oak struck by Lightning (Forest of Compiègne) (1822; Musée du Domaine départemental de Sceaux) all feature thick, oily paint of an intense dark green laid on in long smooth strokes, its inky tonality suggesting a Prussian blue mixture. The sky of Edge of the Wood similarly has an inky quality owing to the presence of Prussian blue. It is evident that in these early landscapes Huet was exploiting the brooding quality of Prussian blue. In NG 6603, on the other hand, while the artist did use this pigment in both the sky and green paint passages, in the former it is mixed with cobalt blue, resulting in a much brighter overall tonality, with the Prussian blue not so dominant; the result is that NG 6603 lacks the Romantic, slightly menacing quality of the other landscapes.

At this point it is pertinent to add that Adolphe Moreau suggested that Huet may have helped to paint the background landscape in Delacroix’s Louis‐Auguste Schwiter (fig. 11), which dates from 1826–30.²¹ Johnson writes that while this may mean that he ‘helped to block in the landscape’, he does see similarities with Huet’s landscape style [of the 1820s] and adds that the ‘nervous and energetic handling of the leaves and flowers on the terrace’ contrasts with the handling of the background.²² Patrick Noon is also of the opinion that Huet almost certainly assisted with Delacroix’s landscape.²³ The dark and brooding trees banked up on the left, enlivened with touches of bright yellow‐green, the long fluid strokes of the landscape and the bright accents of colour denoting the tiny figures are all features that appear in the early Saint‐Cloud landscapes. More recently, Sabine Slanina has disputed this suggestion, asserting instead that the landscape refers both to Schwiter’s own studies (citing a landscape which, while in pastel, exhibits the same dark tonality enlivened with yellow‐green in the tree, and small touch of red and white of figures dwarfed by the trees [Figures in a Landscape Garden, about 1825; pastel, 10.5 × 14.8 cm; Vienna, Schwiter estate]) and to his melancholy nature.²⁴ But even if it cannot be said with any certainty that it was Huet who painted the background, its striking similarity with such early works as described above highlights common features shared by these landscapes painted in the 1820s.

By contrast, comparison with The Ile Séguin in Stormy Weather (fig. 12) on the other hand, shows greater similarity of brushwork. While the trees on the right of the later painting have a darker tonality, they are executed in the same, vigorous, textured brushwork as those in NG 6603. Compositionally NG 6603 also bears a striking relationship to the drawing The Edge of the Wood from his Album de Normandie of 1860 (fig. 13), a view down a wooded avenue, with trees of varying height (having similar silhouettes against the sky) and a central gap, a serried row of trunks on the left and a tree cut off by the top of the sheet on the right. The location depicted in the Louvre drawing is not identified. This is not to argue that the views are the same, nor that drawing and painting were necessarily executed at the same time, but merely to highlight the striking relationship between the compositions, in contrast to the differences enumerated above between NG 6603 and the other Saint‐Cloud views.

The question of whether NG 6603 could have been painted in the 1820s or later in Huet’s career remains to be answered definitively. It is indisputable that NG 6603 was painted in the open air, during a visit to the park. Whilst Huet’s visits to the vicinity were certainly concentrated in the early 1820s, he also returned to Saint‐Cloud later in life: in 1831 he met Théodore Rousseau, with whom he probably went sketching in the park,²⁵ and in 1841 [page 370] he painted in the park in the company of his pupil, the duchesse d’Orleans. Other later views include Interior of the Park of Saint‐Cloud in Summer, Figures under the Trees (1848) and View taken in the Park of Saint‐Cloud (Salon of 1850), which was commissioned by the duchess. To the Exposition Universelle of 1855 Huet submitted a studio composition (based on studies and drawings), Flood at Saint‐Cloud (Park of Saint‐Cloud) (Paris, Louvre).²⁶

While it has been easier to make visual comparisons with Huet’s earlier works than the admittedly sparser group of later views of the park, based on such comparisons the author tentatively proposes a date for NG 6603 of the 1850s. Furthermore, stylistic comparisons aside, the presence of the cadmium pigment, while not ruling out the possibility of an execution in the 1820s, makes it unlikely.

Provenance

The Huet family, by descent to Maurice Perret‐Carnot (1892–1977) by at least 1928 (when Paul Huet’s son, René Paul Huet [1844–1928] died) (Perret‐Carnot was married to René Paul Huet’s daughter Claire); with Galerie Fischer‐Keiner, Paris, by May 1993; acquired there by John Lishawa in May 1993; presented by the Lishawa family in memory of Kate (Lishawa), 2005.

Exhibitions

Paris and New York 1996 (53); Shizuoka, Sydney and Melbourne 2004–5 (48); London 2009 (9 in accompanying book); Edinburgh and Madrid 2010–11 (7); London 2013 (not numbered).

Literature

National Gallery Review 2005–6, p. 14.

Notes