Landscape near Paris

Information

This vast, muddy landscape was painted around 1820-1825.  The sky, heavy with slate-grey clouds ready to break into a heavy downpour, occupies two-thirds of the scene.  There is a feeling of the dramatic tension of a kind of “tragedy of nature”, and of man’s solitude in the face of the strength and immensity of this.  The very substance of the painting manifests roughness with the earth in the foreground, its wide vigorous tints, furrows, thick strokes, and earthy tones, which prefigure Van Gogh’s early period fifty years later.  The stormy tumultuousness of the sky, painted in a more fluid manner, with its violent contrasts between light and grey tones with touches of fierce black, accentuate the feeling of depression.