A founding member of the so-called Barbizon School, Diaz helped upend French landscape tradition in the 1830s and 1840s. Alongside Théodore Rousseau and others of their generation, Diaz abandoned Paris and its academic strictures for the village of Barbizon and the forest of Fontainebleau, drawing inspiration directly from nature. This late, storm-lit landscape demonstrates Diaz’s talent for spectacular luminous effects: the sun breaks through a troubled sky, revealing a rocky landscape, a blasted tree and a lone human figure, picking her way through the middle distance. Richly varied brushwork—much of it painted wet-in-wet—gives the picture its rugged texture and heightens the drama without recourse to a story.
Details
- Artist Name: Narcisse-Virgile Diaz de la Peña (French, 1807-1876)
- Title: The Approaching Storm
- Date: 1870
- Medium: Oil on canvas
- Dimensions: 33-1/4 x 41-5/8 in. (84.4 x 105.6 cm)
- Credit Line: The Norton Simon Foundation, Gift of Mr. Norton Simon
- Accession Number: F.1983.09.P
- Copyright: © The Norton Simon Foundation
Object Information
MM. P.-L. Everard et Cie. de Londres (sale, Paris, 28 April 1873, lot 20, as L’Orage, les grès de Fontainebleau, for FF 10,000).
George I. Seney, New York (sale, New York, American Art Association, 11-13 February 1891, lot 294, for $3,100, to);
Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (sale, New York, Sotheby Parke-Bernet, 3 May 1979, lot 44, to);
Norton Simon Trust No. 2 (1979-1983); gift to;
The Norton Simon Foundation.
[on loan]
- Washington D.C. , Renwick Gallery, 1971-07-22 to 1979
[on loan]
- Princeton University Art Museum, 1979-05-14 to 1979-07-20
Nature Transformed
- Norton Simon Museum, 2004-10-08 to 2005-02-28
Images of the Landscape, Barbizon and Impressionist Paintings from the Permanent Collection
- Norton Simon Museum, 1987-07-02 to 1989-10-29
Reinstallation of South Wing
- Norton Simon Museum, 1993-10-07 to 1995-08-13
- Catalogue of the Paintings in The Corcoran Gallery of Art, no. 85
- The Corcoran Gallery of Art: Illustrated Handbook of the Paintings, Sculpture and other Art Objects (Exclusive of the W. A. Clark Collection), 1939, no. 105
- Masterpieces from the Norton Simon Museum, 1989, p. 117
- Brettell, Richard R. and Stephen F. Eisenman, Nineteenth-Century Art in the Norton Simon Museum, volume 1, 2006,
- Campbell, Sara, Collector Without Walls: Norton Simon and His Hunt for the Best, 2010, cat. 1599 p. 425
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