Philippe Rousseau, 'A Valley', about 1860

Philippe Rousseau is best known now as a still-life painter, but early in his career he painted a series of landscapes in such places as Normandy and Brittany; it was with a Normandy view that he made his debut at the Salon in 1834. This landscape dates from later in his life. The view is along a sunlit valley under a bright sky. While the actual location has not been identified, the hillside at the left, which is divided into strips of small fields or kitchen gardens, can be compared to Pissarro's views of the same period painted in and around the village of Pontoise to the north-west of Paris, for example Jalais Hill, Pontoise (1867, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). A couple of strips are planted with rows of vegetables, perhaps cabbages, and one towards the left is sprinkled with the red of what must be poppies. While hinting at man’s work, Rousseau otherwise excludes human presence.

The high horizon, which became a popular device in the later nineteenth century, was also employed by artists such as Millet, Rousseau (see his A Rocky Landscape) and by Corot in his earlier views of the Morvan region, such as Peasants under the Trees at Dawn.

The technique varies considerably across the canvas. The foreground is much more sketchily and thinly painted, with a brown underlayer, possibly a ground, showing through. The fresh cool tonality of the greens, achieved by the addition of a fair degree of white, and the broad fluid brushwork, set the view apart from many Barbizon School landscapes of the same period. Its freely painted technique can be compared to that of the early Impressionists.