Original works of art
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Percival Leonard Rosseau |
(American, 1859 -1937 ) |
Percival Leonard Rosseau was born in 1859 at his parent’s home in Pointe
Coupe Parish, about 30 miles from Baron Rouge, Louisiana. While the civil war
had shattered his family, Percival persevered and with the help of foster parents
finished school; a school where he was fortunately able to study carving and
drawing.
His talent for art was put aside, however, while he engaged in various adventures,
including the driving of cattle between Mexico and Texas when he was 18-22 years
old. He eventually moved to New Orleans where he established an import business.
The business did well and after taking a partner, he moved its operations to
New York City. Much to the surprise of his partner and friends, once established,
he decided to fulfill his artistic ambitions and leaving his business in the
hands of his partner, moved to Paris where he enrolled at the Academie Julien,
departing from California and visiting Honolulu and Hong Kong.
In 1894 at the age of 35, he enrolled in Academie Julien. It was in Paris that
his artistic style developed, for his training was very disciplined, studying
for three full years in only black and white, followed by three years in color.
He studied under Jules Lefebvre (1836-1911) and Tony Robert-Fleury (1837-1912)
who were figurative painters. Hermann Leon, who often painted animals (1838-1907),
was also on the staff at the time, but it is uncertain if Rosseau studied with
him. His most important influence, however, was from his friends who he met
on a sketching trip down the Seine to Rolleboise. They painted in the style
of the School of Barbizon, a romanticized vision which was noted for its soft,
subdued tones and painterly style.
The Barbizon School was a mid-nineteenth century school of painting which derived
its name from Barbizon, a village thirty miles south-east of Paris in the Fontainebleau
forest. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the 42,000 acre forest surrounding
the palace of Fontainebleau, once the site of the great royal hunts, was the
domain of highway robbers and isolated woodsmen. A mere half-century later,
one hundred thousand Parisians a year traveled to Fontainebleau to enjoy a respite
from the pressures of daily life. The village of Barbizon, once a primitive
farming area of perhaps twenty dwellings, became identified with the great revolution
in French landscape and animal painting that took place between 1830 and 1880.
During that time, Barbizon became a remarkable focus, not only for painters
but also for sculptors, poets and novelists.
Because of its closeness to the forest of Fontainebleau, the village of Barbizon
became the base to which scores of artists departed, as a retreat from urban
life, to paint the various parts and denizens of the great forest. Fontainebleau
was like a primeval forest, and artists were attracted to its dense and uncultivated
forest and its rocky gorges, boulders and caves. It had the added advantage
of being located a short journey from the increasingly mechanized world of Paris.
No longer desirous of painting mythological or religious themes and classical
scenes that took place in ancient Greece and Rome, artists chose to paint directly
from nature. Studying passionately, with no other object than that of observing
nature directly, and expressing what they saw as it impressed them, gave a fresh
stimulus to the study of nature.
The inspiration for this new movement came from several different factors: the
social, political and economical consequences of the French Revolutions, the
rise of Romanticism, and a renewed interest for British painting, where landscape
and animal painting had developed earlier, as well as for the 17th century Dutch
painters on whom the English tradition had been founded.
The Barbizon painters were essentially colorists, for they held that the dapples
and shimmering effects of light in nature could not be effectively depicted
with the highly finished, academic approach, and it was into this milieu that
the American Rosseau easily found himself.
Rosseau initially painted mostly landscapes and nudes, and continued his training
by traveling back and forth between France and America. He received an honorable
mention at the Paris Salon of 1900 for one of his nudes, entitled, “Araidne.”
His painting of Diana with her two Irish Wolfhounds received much more positive
attention when it was exhibited in the Salon of 1903, but the focus of admiration
was centered more on the dogs than on the nude. It was in 1903, however, that
he painted two pictures of setters for the 1904 Salon. On opening night he received
more enquiries than he ever had before, and he sold the work the next day. Indeed,
the day after the opening of the Salon exhibition, he received several telegrams
about it. In his own words, he said, “ The day afer the Salon opened I
received eleven telegrams asking my prices for the pictures, and I sold both
in a few hours. Thereafter I had little trouble selling my work. A man should
paint what he knows best, and I knew more about animals than anything else.
I have ran hounds from childhood, and have at my fingertips the thorough knowledge
of dogs necessary to picture them faithfully. It takes years to acquire this.”
Describing his technique, he declared that “In France, I used to spend
a great deal of time in the hunting field making sketches from the day the shooting
season opened. Most of painting over there was from such sketches.”
From that point on, Rosseau devoted himself almost entirely to the painting
of dogs, including his famous picture of a panther hunt, with over forty hounds.
The picture, which won a gold medal in the salon of 1906, was shipped to New
York where it was put on display at The Knoedler Galleries. It was widely acclaimed,
with even President Roosevelt writing him to congratulate the artist on the
painting’s authenticity.
Rosseau built a house in Rotheboise, near Bonniers, with a studio and kennels,
and he executed several commissions for important European sportsmen, but he
also did paintings for exhibition at The Knoedler Galleries in New York City.
Soon thereafter, Rosseau started to receive commissions for the portraits of
purebred dogs, and setters and pointers were to dominate, working for such prominent
sportsmen as Percy Rockefeller and Clarence Mackay, whom he stayed with for
an extended period in 1912.. While he continued to live in France, he made frequent
trips to America to paint dogs, often staying with his clients, hunting with
them, and painting their dogs He did occasionally paint other breeds of dogs,
and for friends he would sometimes do paintings of horses or pets.
Rosseau commuted between France and the United States for a number of years,
spending his summers in Rotheboise and the winters in Old Lyme, Connecticut
and Denton, North Carolina. World War I eventually forced him to return to America
in 1915. It is said that from this period to the end of his life, he only painted
setters and pointers. He purchased a house in Old Lyme, Connecticut where the
family lived in the warmer months. An avid sportsman, he did most of his hunting
at a private club in Denton and later at Percy Rockefeller’s Overhills
Club in Fayetteville. Percy Rockefeller was to become Rosseau’s most important
patron, and in 1916 he built Rosseau and his wife, Nancy a house, studio and
kennels at Overhills. Rockefeller kept bird dogs and fox hounds on the premises
as well as horses for quail and fox hunts. Rosseau and his family would spend
the colder months there, returning to Connecticut when it warmed up.
While Rosseau’s early work is more in the academic tradition of the nineteenth
century, he soon developed a loose, painterly style which was influenced by
the work of the Barbizon School of painters that he had come in touch with in
France. |