Théodore Rousseau - [Mountain landscape with river and church on a hill]

Title, attribution, date, subject, and physical description by Diane de Grazia, 2014.
Inscribed in ink and pencil on back of drawing: "LC B 1511."
George Lothrop Bradley Collection.
Michel Schulman, Theodore Rousseau 1812-1867, Paris, 1997, vol. 1, p. 103, cat. no. 64.
Bequest; George Lothrop Bradley; 1919.
Schulman dated this sheet to 1830 and compared it with the painting, Le Pêcheur, in the Fondation Willem Van der Vorm, Rotterdam (repr. Paris, Musée du Louvre, Théodore Rousseau 1812-1867, exh. cat., 1967, cat. no. 6). The landscape reflects others that Rousseau painted of the mountainous Auvergne region, where he traveled in 1830 (for dating, see Schulman 1997, p. 5). Comparable drawings with similar compositions possibly made in the same place exist in the Louvre and in the British Museum (Schulman 1997, vol. 1, p. 103, cat. nos. 65-66). For similar paintings, see Schulman vol. 2 (1999), p. 89, cat. nos. 24-25; p. 91, cat. no. 29; and p. 93, cat. no. 36. Rousseau's use of charcoal emphasizes the inherent drama of the landscape itself, contrasting the dark trees and hills with the flowing river at center and the distant, lightly indicated landscape in the background.