Théodore Rousseau landscapes at the Morgan

Part of this no doubt had to do with the threatening wildness of nature beyond city walls, so that it was only with the growth of a confident urbanity that the domestication of nature could fully proceed. The perception of landscape per se is an act of appropriation, and its development as an aesthetic genre involves a fascinating dialectic: On the one hand, nature can be represented as an alien grandeur obeying its own laws according to its often violent rhythms, while on the other hand, the very act of representation is a form of exerting control and imposing a human order on it.

It starts with Dürer

As in so much else, the German master Albrecht Dürer was a pioneering figure. Dürer wasn’t greatly interested in large views, and the development of the German landscape tradition would have to await Albrecht Altdorfer, Wolf Huber, and others. But he focused in on the close observation of wild plants and animals, which he registered with a painstaking fidelity. Medieval artists had also been excellent observers, but their depiction of plant life had been ornamental where not religious in purpose. Dürer clearly felt the life of plants and animals and valued them as objects in their right, irreducible to human interests even when they served them.

From that point on through van Gogh, whose small-scale depictions of rough grasses was the subject of a fascinating show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art a few years ago, Western painting engaged the natural world in a wholly new way. The growth of secularism and scientific empiricism contributed to it, and, in the late 19th century, painters like Seurat paid meticulous attention to new developments in the field of optics. At the same time, of course, the perception of landscape was suffused with subjective emotion, and, as the natural world became a receptacle for religious sensibility, it revitalized an ancient tradition going back to Roman times, that of the sublime.

It was the French who, although relative latecomers, came to define the landscape tradition as it had emerged by the 19th century. At first, French painters like Claude went south to Italy for their inspiration, but gradually they turned to their native soil. The homage they paid it, region by region, vista by vista, it is one of the glories of Western art. Yet, at the same time, it was they who would ultimately deconstruct the tradition through Impressionism, Fauvism, and Cubism.

The triumph of Kant

This was an inevitable consequence of the triumph of Kantian philosophy. Kant had argued that the objective world was beyond sensory or intellectual perception, and that what appeared to us as nature was a human construct. If this were the case, it followed that the human perspective was final, epistemologically if not ontologically, and that artists should feel free to invest the world with their subjective response. The result of this would be that what was seen was subsumed by the act of seeing, so that recognizable objects — seas, skies, mountains, forests — would eventually disappear into abstract compositional forms. Some of these would continue to be called “landscapes,” but they would no longer correspond to the common coin of a shared sense perception.

French Impressionism marked a decisive break with the earlier landscape tradition, whose final achievement was the work of the Barbizon School, so called for the outlying region of Paris favored by its adherents. The Barbizon painters wanted to depict a nature purged both of Baroque and Romantic excrescence, and observed it with a scrupulosity and exactitude that was characteristically French. One of their prime figures was Théodore Rousseau (1812-1867), who worked not only around Barbizon but also in Normandy, Franche-Comté, and the Auvergne. The several dozen oil sketches and other drawings currently on display at the Morgan Library range from Rousseau’s highly precocious teen years to the end of his life. They are extraordinarily beautiful and accomplished works that share a celebratory clarity of vision.

Of course, Rousseau’s own sensibility is present in each work, as well as his exquisite responsiveness to light, color, and texture and his masterly ability to project the essence of his vision. What is absent, though, or better said withheld, is any obtrusive sense of personality. He shows us our common world, which is after all the ground from which its ultimate mystery must proceed.

Discovery, not projection

Rousseau achieves his effects equally, though diversely, with oil, ink, charcoal, graphite, and watercolor, and with a restraint that always seems to suggest a further richness beyond the revealed. The effect is clear and vivid, as in Plateau above a Valley, a work of Rousseau’s teenage years, where the rock is as clean as a sliced apple, or Landscape at Lavigerie, with its lovely springtime greens. But Rousseau loves motion, even tumult, as Waterfall and Cascade indicate, or Windswept Trees on a Rocky Plain.

The line he doesn’t wish to cross, though, is that between natural effect and human response. The Romantics were doing that; the Expressionists would go even further, preempting the emotions landscape might suggest with their own. Rousseau and his colleagues, one might say, were making a last stand for classicism, although their work is hardly void of feeling. They were quite aware that landscape is not only a perceptual event but also an aesthetic construct. But they presented what they saw as discovery, not projection. The line they were preserving might be variously described as transpersonal, moral, or religious. It is one that must be reasserted from time to time. It honors the world beyond us by rendering its appearances as faithfully as possible.