Rising Storm above a Hilly and Wooded Landscape

Rising Storm above a Hilly and Wooded Landscape from 1850 by Théodore Rousseau captures the dramatic weather effects that were a specialty of the Barbizon school. Rousseau's ability to render the changing atmosphere of the French countryside—storm light, gathering clouds, the particular quality of air before rain—was central to the school's revolutionary naturalism. The Barbizon painters, working in and around the Forest of Fontainebleau from the 1830s onward, developed a practice of direct observation that anticipated the Impressionist commitment to painting from nature. Rousseau's approach to landscape combined meticulous observation of specific trees, light conditions, and atmospheric effects with a deep reverence for the natural world that gave his paintings a quasi-pantheistic spiritual intensity. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam holds this work as part of its important collection of French Romantic and Barbizon landscape painting.

The approaching storm creates dramatic atmospheric tension, with dark clouds massing above the landscape rendered in Rousseau's characteristic thick, textured brushwork.