Landscape fantasies and farm fictions in French drawings and prints during the ancien regime

Magazine Antiques, Oct, 1995 by Jennifer Milam

In Jacques Callot's View of Mountains Across a Lake (Pl. III), huge rock formations rising from the glassy water dwarf the slanted-roof structures built by man, creating an implausible contrast of scale. The idea for the picture was doubtlessly based on Callot's direct study of nature, but the emphasis on a general massing of forms, the lack of details, and the fantastic scale all heighten the imaginary quality of the view. Such a display of artistic imagination prompted the artist and theorist Roger de Piles (1635-1709 to assert that landscape painting presented more creative possibilities than other genres.(1)

The ideal eighteenth-century French landscape was similarly a combination of observation and imagination, with nature being embellished through the inclusion of ruins and other noble buildings. Artists often re-created nature from memory with the help of a sketchbook or collected sketches that could be continually combined to invent convincing natural effects. The ancient rain in Hubert Robert's Landscape with Ruins (cover and Pl. II), for example, is based on the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina, which he undoubtedly sketched a decade earlier while he was in Rome.(2) The contorted tree in the foreground appears again in a drawing dated two years later.(3)

The fictional image of the countryside developed over two centuries. Claude Lorrain was among the first to define the pastoral ideal (see Pl. IV). Unlike his contemporary Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665), who created landscapes filled with drama and turbulence, Claude devised views of nature to charm and to please - an aesthetic approach continued in the eighteenth century by Francois Boucher. Travelers and shepherds appear in Claudes and Boucher's pastoral scenes not as they actually lived but as they might have wished to live - enjoying nature, wandering serene paths filled with wonder and beauty (Pls. IV, V). The fiction of such pictures is that only the most appealing aspects are shown. For many, particularly the Parisian elite and courtiers, life in the countryside became synonymous with the idealized life represented in such works. As Louis Carrogis, known as Carmontelle, sagaciously observed, "everything appears charming...in verse and in paintings, and it can be nothing else; they only know the inhabitants of the country in agreeable forms."(4)

Traditionally, drawings and paintings of people working or playing in nature were part of series representing the various times of day, the twelve months, or the four seasons - iconography that dates back to antiquity and early Christian times. The iconography became less important as nature and everyday activities became legitimate subjects in theft own right, but it continued to provide a vocabulary of imagery for landscape pictures. Scenes of work were rarely represented in a realistic way, however. Consequently, Claude's apparently literal Landscape in Latium with Farm Laborers (Pl. VI) is a notable exception, both within his oeuvre and within seventeenth-century landscape drawings in general. The view appears to have been partially rendered on the spot - the extended view of mountains outlined in black chalk and the rapid pen strokes give the drawing a spontaneous look, but this is not a spontaneous sketch. The drawing has a clear structure and was probably composed in the studio from life sketches of laborers at work. It may have been intended as a study for a canvas depicting a harvest scene with metaphoric associations, a scene that would have been idealized in painted form.

Work or play in the outdoors often served to draw people together, and artists who represented gardens and landscapes often chose to emphasize this social function. In depicting harvests, seasonal celebrations, and other festivals and fairs outdoors, they used nature to contribute to the significance of the scene. A characteristic mixture of fantasy and reality, Callot's Fair at Xeuilley (Pl. I) appears to be a composite of several springtime celebrations in the small town in Lorraine where he had a house. The enormous tree evokes a feeling of community by seeming to embrace the entire company of villagers - peasants and gentry alike. Jacques Stella's Apple Harvest (Pl. VIII) idealizes seasonal labor as a time when an entire village works happily together to reap the rewards of nature. Here the apple tree not only provides fruit, it also furnishes shade where the villagers can converse and the children can play. A description of a model society penned by Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) might have applied to this scene: "in the midst of constant labor, everything was pleasure and entertainment; the hardest toils passed for recreation."(5)

The taste for fantasy within nature exemplified by these types of drawings endured not only in French art but also in French culture throughout the ancien regime. Images such as Callot's and Stella's helped popularize the notion of good country living filled with "harmony and brotherhood."(6) Moreover, landscape was increasingly used to add a metaphoric dimension to such representations, a dimension that developed further into the Rousseauean ideal whereby an outdoor location ensured a virtuous and joyful gathering: