Trees and Pool

ca. 1840-1850

Some mid-nineteenth-century French artists, such as Auguste-François Bonheur, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Narcisse-Virgile Diaz de la Peña, and Théodore Rousseau, were proponents of working en plein air (painting outdoors). In their informal oil sketches, the terrain, foliage, and sky are loosely defined with a series of delicate touches and broad brushstrokes, foreshadowing the Impressionist interest in light and atmosphere. These are the kind of quickly rendered landscapes that might have been used as studies for larger, more formal compositions made in the studio. Spanish artist Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida continued to use this technique in the early twentieth century, making a small oil study of boaters on the coast of Valencia using a bright, vivid color palette.