Pierre-Etienne-Théodore Rousseau

Théodore Rousseau was a central figure in the renewal of landscape painting that radically changed the French art world during the nineteenth-century.  Even when he was excluded from the Paris Salon exhibitions for much of the 1830s and 1840s (by antagonistic juries and his own willfulness), Rousseau still dominated the artistic conversation on the basis of painted studies passed around friends' studios or paintings featured in dealers' shop windows.

Seascapes are rare in Rousseau's oeuvre.  Although he traveled widely throughout France, he painted along the coast only twice, in the early 1830s when he made at least two summer trips to the Channel Coast and Mont-Saint-Michel in Normandy; and in 1844, when he stopped briefly on the Côte Basque, near Biarritz, on his return from the Pyrenees.  Marine belongs to Rousseau's Normandy visits, probably to his 1831 trip up the Seine to Honfleur and the broad Seine estuary.  At this early point in his career, Rousseau's plein air studies were directed toward mastering broad landscape forms and distinctive light effects, as in this examination of dawn breaking over a distant headland, faintly coloring the sea across the still shadowy foreground.  Even in a painting that is largely a sky study, Rousseau's lifelong interest in painterly textures comes to the fore in the staccato strokes that edge the cresting waves or the thready pulls of thick lead white that trace the ebbing waters.