Landscape with Trees Pascal Adolphe Jean Dagnan-Bouveret

Along with his close friend Jules Bastien-Lepage, Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret was one of the leading representatives of the French naturalist school and gained international recognition. Although, in the 1870s and 1880s, he made his name chiefly through genre paintings of everyday rural life and depictions of religious processions in Brittany, he gradually became less committed to realism: at around the turn of the century, he started to produce monumental compositions infused with deep religiosity and symbolist overtones.
As one of the chief proponents of naturalist plein air painting, he produced most of his works outdoors, yet landscapes tend to appear merely as backdrops to his genre scenes. His landscape paintings are less well known and make up only a small proportion of his oeuvre. This painting is characterised by its vivid green tones and lively brushwork. The scene is framed on the left by the darker accent of the three tree trunks, while the small stream meanders freely on the right. Trees obscure the horizon, and there is no glimpse of the sky in the hazy background. The contained composition and almost monochrome palette help to immerse the viewer in this simple, uneventful, yet atmospheric landscape.

Anna Zsófia Kovács