Landscape after a Storm

Landscape after a Storm, from 1835 and now in the National Gallery Prague, captures the transitional atmospheric moment that follows violent weather — the clearing air, the wet surfaces still glistening, the sky caught between cloud and clearing, light returning to a landscape that has been dramatically transformed. This subject had romantic precedents in Constable, whose storm landscapes Rousseau admired and whose influence on French painting from the late 1820s was significant. 1835 was a productive early year for Rousseau, just before his first sustained engagement with the Fontainebleau forest that would define his career. Storm aftermath appealed to Rousseau because it concentrated on natural process — not the landscape in its stable, quotidian condition, but at a moment of transition and atmospheric intensity. Prague's National Gallery holds several Rousseau canvases that document his early and developing style.

The post-storm canvas deploys cool, silver-gray tones for the clearing sky, contrasted with the warmer, wet surfaces of the ground still glistening from rain. Rousseau's handling of the clearing sky — a mix of remaining storm cloud and breaking light — demands careful tonal gradation across the upper canvas.