La Source du Lison (Doubs)

La Source du Lison (Doubs), executed in charcoal in 1837, documents Rousseau's engagement with the Franche-Comté region of eastern France, where the Lison river emerges dramatically from a limestone resurgence cave — one of the most striking natural spectacles in the French countryside. Charcoal was a medium Rousseau used extensively for studies and finished works alike, allowing rapid tonal notation of the effects of light on water, rock, and vegetation that he would later develop in paint. The Doubs département presented a landscape quite unlike Fontainebleau or the Norman coast: deep river gorges, karst formations, and dense riparian vegetation that required a different compositional approach. Working in charcoal enabled Rousseau to capture the drama of the source's shadowed entrance and the interplay of reflections without the slower commitments of oil, and the resulting work has a spontaneous energy and atmospheric density that oil sometimes softens. The drawing is held in the collections recovered under the Musées Nationaux Récupération programme, which returned works displaced during the Second World War to French public collections, adding a layer of provenance history to this modest but accomplished study of natural spectacle.

Charcoal on paper enables rapid, expressive tonal gradation from the deep shadow of the cave mouth to the brightness of water and sky. Rousseau's handling exploits the medium's capacity for broad smudged passages alongside sharp linear definition of rock edges and overhanging foliage.