Landscape with Timber Waggon

Landscape with Timber Waggon from 1825 at the Wallace Collection shows Bonington painting the rural French countryside with the direct observation and luminous technique that made his landscapes revolutionary. The humble subject is transformed by his sparkling treatment of light and atmosphere into something genuinely poetic. Bonington, who died at twenty-five in 1828, achieved a technical mastery of watercolor and oil that astonished contemporaries including Delacroix, with whom he shared a Paris studio and who acknowledged his profound influence on the development of French Romantic painting. The timber waggon, an ordinary working vehicle of rural France, becomes in Bonington's hands a vehicle for exploring the play of sunlight on wheels, horses, and muddy lanes — the same democratic approach to subject matter that would characterize the Barbizon painters and ultimately the Impressionists. The Wallace Collection's holdings of Bonington's work represent one of the finest groups anywhere, preserving the luminous freshness of his technique with exceptional quality.

The wagon and trees are rendered with confident, economical brushwork, the play of light through foliage captured with the spontaneous touches that give Bonington's landscapes their characteristic freshness.