Theodore Rousseau
Rousseau was born in Paris, the son of a tailor. He had his first lessons from a cousin of his mother and from other mediocre painters. They taught him to use a brush and paint, no doubt, but he probably learnt more from the visits he was paying to the Louvre and the study he was devoting to the works of Claude, Van Goyen and Karel du Jardin. If he looked at paintings he looked also at the landscape. As his response to what he saw was controlled by his personality and temperament, these contributed much to the character of his painting.
He desired truth to the nature he had learned to love so much, but it was truth to nature in all it universality, not only in its particular details - the botanical forms and structures of rocks and trees which he studied so patiently and analysed so carefully.
He was not interested in the passing phases of nature. His was a threefold aim. He wished at one and the same time to express something deep and fundamental in the life of nature, the particularity of each place or natural form, and his own thoughts and feelings. As he wrote in a letter to Guizot "One does not copy with mathematical precision what one sees but one feels and interprets a real world, all of whose fatalities hold you fast bound".
Life was not easy for him. The voyage of his artistic career was "set fair" at its commencement. His background was a happy middle-class family. He had the encouragement of an early success at the Salon where his first submitted picture was hung. But his very success proved his undoing. He was not spoilt by success but by the jealousies of older painters. His growing reputation and the power and originality of his work alarmed the academic landscape painters. "This man is dangerous", they said, "he must be opposed". He shared the lot of all the great original talents of the 19th century. The doors of the Salon which he had seemed to storm so easily were henceforth closed to him. It was fourteen years, bitter, disillusioned years, before his work was once again accepted. He became known as "the great rejected". He was in his middle forties before real success came. After the Universal Exhibition of 1857 he was at least able to sell his pictures, some to wealthy Americans. Following his death the great collectors of the Old and New Worlds vied with one another for possession of them.
