Antique Oil Landscape in the Barbizon Manner, Carved Giltwood Frame

Period
Late 19th to early 20th century

Size
16½ x 19 inches, framed

An oil landscape in the Barbizon manner, signed lower left, the signature illegible, in a carved and gilded Louis XV revival frame.

The view is from within the wood interior, with a single light source from an opening in the canopy. The palette stays in browns, olives and dull greens, and the paint is heaviest in the foliage.

There is paint loss to the surface, sold as found.

The frame is carved and gilded with a serpentine outer edge, floral rosettes at the corners and centers, acanthus scrolls between them and a twisted rope molding on the inner rail. There are losses at the corners and rubbing throughout.

Historical Context
The Barbizon painters worked in and around the forest of Fontainebleau from the 1830s and made ordinary woodland a subject in its own right. The device of one break in the canopy lighting an otherwise dark interior came to them from seventeenth-century Dutch landscape, Ruisdael and Hobbema above all. The manner outlived and outtravelled the group, with British, Dutch, Belgian, German and American painters producing tonal woodland interiors on the same model well into the twentieth century.