Théodore Rousseau (1812-1867) was one of the greatest and most influential landscape painters in 19th century France. He was a founding member of the Barbizon School of painting, a movement named for the town where the artists lived and worked from 1830 to about 1870. The most notable members included J.F. Millet, Charles François Daubigny, Jules Dupre, Henri Harpignies, Narcisse Diaz, and Constant Troyon.

Led by Rousseau, the painters of the Barbizon school made it a point to work outdoors and represent landscape as they saw it, as opposed to presenting a “perfect” landscape created in the artist’s imagination, or used as the backdrop to a scene or narrative event. Influenced by the work of the British painter John Constable whose paintings were shown in Paris for the first time in 1824, Rousseau portrayed nature as wild and untamed, depicting the intense weather conditions, colorful skies, and vivid lighting effects he observed. Rousseau and his colleagues were avid environmentalists, deeply concerned with the encroaching industrialization which they saw as a threat to their countryside. His pioneering views and determination to paint outdoors in an extraordinary range of styles and techniques left a lasting influence on European art and particularly the Impressionists.

After great struggle and fluctuation in his popularity as an artist, Rousseau finally enjoyed an interlude of critical and popular success in the 1850s. Despite a brief period of success, Rousseau still struggled, sharing a studio in Barbizon with the more successful J.F. Millet, in whose arms he died in 1867.