Landscape (Auvergne?)

Landscape (Auvergne?), undated and now in the Princeton Art Museum, carries the uncertainty of its geographical attribution directly in its title — a curatorial acknowledgment that the location cannot be definitively identified. The Auvergne, the volcanic plateau region of central France, was one of the landscapes Rousseau painted during his extensive traveling years before and during his Barbizon period; its distinctive volcanic geology, lava plateaus, and wide skies offered a character quite different from the Fontainebleau forest. Rousseau's Auvergne canvases tend to have a broader, more open quality than his forest work, with the volcanic terrain's horizontal emphasis creating expansive, panoramic compositions. Princeton's art museum holds this canvas as part of its collection of French Romantic painting, the question mark in the title preserving an honest uncertainty about attribution that less scrupulous cataloguing might have elided.

The canvas, if Auvergne, would reflect that region's distinctive open landscape: volcanic plateau forms, wide horizon, the particular silvery light of elevated central France. Rousseau's palette in Auvergne work tends toward cooler, more austere tones than his warm Fontainebleau harmonies.