{
"data": {
"id": 149946,
"accession_number": "1980.18",
"share_license_status": "CC0",
"tombstone": "The Fisherman (Le P\u00eacheur), c. 1840\u201345. Th\u00e9odore Rousseau (French, 1812\u20131867). Pen and brown ink and brush, gray and black wash (scratched away in places), with touches of pink watercolor; sheet: 20.9 x 28 cm (8 1/4 x 11 in.); secondary support: 20.9 x 28 cm (8 1/4 x 11 in.); tertiary support: 29.6 x 37.9 cm (11 5/8 x 14 15/16 in.). The Cleveland Museum of Art, John L. Severance Fund, 1980.18",
"current_location": null,
"title": "The Fisherman (Le P\u00eacheur)",
"creation_date": "c. 1840\u201345",
"creation_date_earliest": 1835,
"creation_date_latest": 1850,
"artists_tags": [
"male"
],
"culture": [
"France, 19th century"
],
"technique": "pen and brown ink and brush, gray and black wash (scratched away in places), with touches of pink watercolor",
"support_materials": [
{
"description": "beige(1) wove paper laid down on brown wove paper perimeter mounted to a false margin of beige(1) wove paper",
"watermarks": []
}
],
"department": "Drawings",
"collection": "DR - French",
"type": "Drawing",
"measurements": "Sheet: 20.9 x 28 cm (8 1/4 x 11 in.); Secondary Support: 20.9 x 28 cm (8 1/4 x 11 in.); Tertiary Support: 29.6 x 37.9 cm (11 5/8 x 14 15/16 in.)",
"dimensions": {
"sheet": {
"height": 0.209,
"width": 0.28
},
"secondary support": {
"height": 0.209,
"width": 0.28
},
"tertiary support": {
"height": 0.296,
"width": 0.379
}
},
"state_of_the_work": null,
"edition_of_the_work": null,
"copyright": null,
"inscriptions": [
{
"inscription": "signed, lower left, in brown ink: TH. Rousseau ; VERSO OF SECONDARY SUPPORT, upper left, in graphite: 2830 [circled] ; upper left, in graphite: Th Rousseau / The Fisherman / id. x. x. ; upper left, in graphite: 52149 ; VERSO OF TERTIARY SUPPORT, upper right, in black fiber-tipped pen: D 19 [sideways]",
"inscription_translation": null,
"inscription_remark": null,
"sortorder": null
}
],
"exhibitions": {
"current": [
{
"id": 304521,
"title": "Year in Review: 1980",
"description": "Year in Review: 1980. The Cleveland Museum of Art (organizer) (June 24-July 19, 1981).",
"opening_date": "1981-06-24T04:00:00"
},
{
"id": 310038,
"title": "The Graphic Art of the Barbizon School",
"description": "The Graphic Art of the Barbizon School. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (March 17-May 17, 1987).",
"opening_date": "1987-03-17T05:00:00"
},
{
"id": 311635,
"title": "French Drawings from the Collection",
"description": "French Drawings from the Collection. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (December 13, 1994-March 12, 1995).",
"opening_date": "1994-12-13T05:00:00"
},
{
"id": 178036,
"title": "Nature Sublime: Landscapes from the 19th Century",
"description": "Nature Sublime: Landscapes from the 19th Century. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (August 15-November 14, 2004).",
"opening_date": "2004-08-15T00:00:00"
},
{
"id": 217138,
"title": "Unruly Nature: The Landscapes of Th\u00e9odore Rousseau",
"description": "Unruly Nature: The Landscapes of Th\u00e9odore Rousseau. J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA (organizer) (June 21-September 11, 2016).",
"opening_date": "2016-06-21T00:00:00"
}
],
"legacy": []
},
"provenance": [
{
"description": "[Schaeffer Galleries, New York]",
"citations": [],
"footnotes": null,
"date": null,
"sortorder": null
}
],
"find_spot": null,
"related_works": [],
"former_accession_numbers": [],
"did_you_know": null,
"description": "The quintessential Barbizon artist, Rousseau was romantically in love with nature. He spent the better part of twenty years living in near poverty in a cottage in the village of Barbizon, painting in a converted barn. The Fisherman is an early drawing by the artist, probably executed on the outskirts of Paris. The tree, the foreground grasses and rocks, and the humble form of the fisherman at rest are rendered with great specificity. Rousseau thought of each tree in the Forest of Fontainebleau as being almost human, each marked by a particular fate and struggle.",
"external_resources": {
"wikidata": [
"https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q79931805"
],
"internet_archive": [
"https://archive.org/details/clevelandart-1980.18-the-fisherman-le-pec"
]
},
"citations": [
{
"citation": "Lee, Sherman E. \u201cThe Year in Review for 1980.\u201d The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 68, no. 6 (June 1981): 163\u2013219.",
"page_number": "Reproduced: p. 195; Mentioned: p. 217, no. 231",
"url": "http://www.jstor.org/stable/25159730"
},
{
"citation": "Allan, Scott and E\u0301douard Kopp. Unruly Nature: The Landscapes of The\u0301odore Rousseau. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2016.",
"page_number": "Reproduced: p. 111, plate 23; Mentioned: p. 170",
"url": null
}
],
"url": "https://clevelandart.org/art/1980.18",
"images": {
"annotation": null,
"web": {
"url": "https://openaccess-cdn.clevelandart.org/1980.18/1980.18_web.jpg",
"width": "1200",
"height": "893",
"filesize": "909835",
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"print": {
"url": "https://openaccess-cdn.clevelandart.org/1980.18/1980.18_print.jpg",
"width": "3400",
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"full": {
"url": "https://openaccess-cdn.clevelandart.org/1980.18/1980.18_full.tif",
"width": "6390",
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},
"alternate_images": [],
"creditline": "John L. Severance Fund",
"image_credit": null,
"sketchfab_id": null,
"sketchfab_url": null,
"gallery_donor_text": null,
"athena_id": 149946,
"creators": [
{
"id": 1594,
"description": "Th\u00e9odore Rousseau (French, 1812\u20131867)",
"extent": null,
"qualifier": null,
"role": "artist",
"biography": "Introduced to landscape painting through his cousin Pau de Saint-Martin (q.v.), Rousseau entered the studio of Jean-Charles-Joseph R\u00e9mond (1795-1875) in 1826 and was later taught by history painter Guillaume Lethi\u00e8re (1760-1832). The young artist copied the works of Claude Lorrain (1600-1682) and Dutch seventeenth-century landscape painters at the Louvre, and he was intrigued by contemporary painters such as Constable (q.v.) and Bonington (q.v.). His foremost interest, however, was the study of nature. In 1830 he traveled extensively through the Auvergne and was much inspired by the wilderness of this region. Scheffer (q.v.), who admired Rousseau's nature studies from this period, introduced him to the Paris art circles of Charles Baudelaire and Delacroix (q.v.). In the early 1830s Rousseau also met Corot (q.v.) and became very close friends with Dupr\u00e9 (q.v.). Rousseau exhibited at the Salons of 1831 and 1833-35. After 1836 he began to travel extensively throughout France, notably to the forest of Fontainebleau and to Barbizon, where he would return every year and become the leader of the group of romantic-naturalist artists, the so-called Barbizon School. In the 1850s he also became increasingly involved in the movement to preserve the forest of Fontainebleau from industrialization. From 1836 until 1841 all of Rousseau's works were refused at the Salon because the jury advocated a more classicizing landscape painting. As he was also often passed over for official honors, the artist became known as \"le grand refus\u00e9\" and abstained from showing his work at the Salon most of the 1840s. After the 1848 revolution, the new regime under Napoleon III rated his work more favorably, even granting him a first-class medal at the 1849 Salon, so he no longer had to submit his work to the jury. Yet Rousseau had not been awarded the Legion of Honor, an even stronger insult when Dupr\u00e9 received it. In the early 1850s Rousseau befriended Millet (q.v.), and the two often worked together in Barbizon. Rousseau's international breakthrough occurred at the 1855 Exposition Universelle, where his work was exhibited in a gallery that he shared with Decamps (q.v.). Throughout his career, however, the sale of his work was unstable, partly because not showing regularly at the Salon limited his exposure. The artist therefore even had to organize two auctions (1850, 1861) of his works in order to make money, but the results were disappointing. Rousseau exhibited thirteen paintings at the Exposition Universelle of 1867 and figured as president of the jury. Yet because of his animosity with Comte de Nieuwerkerke, directeur-g\u00e9n\u00e9ral des mus\u00e9es imp\u00e9riaux, the artist only received a grand medal and not the anticipated highest rank, Officer of the Legion of Honor. The lesser medal was awarded only after heavy protest from Rousseau's friends, five months before his death, and Nieuwerkerke had the last word, refusing to honor the artist with a posthumous retrospective as would have been expected. Although Barbizon painters such as Rousseau are noted for their study from nature, many worked on their larger canvases in the studio. And even though his art was still rooted in a romantic spirit, Rousseau's plein-air studies and his preoccupation with the rendering of specific light effects were instrumental for the development of impressionism.",
"name_in_original_language": null,
"birth_year": "1812",
"death_year": "1867",
"use_in_caption": true,
"include_extent": false,
"weight": 1
}
],
"legal_status": "accessioned",
"accession_date": "1980-01-30T00:00:00",
"sortable_date": 1835,
"date_added_to_oa": null,
"date_text": "c. 1840\u201345",
"collapse_artists": false,
"on_loan": false,
"recently_acquired": false,
"record_type": "object",
"conservation_statement": null,
"has_conservation_images": false,
"cover_accession_number": null,
"is_nazi_era_provenance": false,
"impression": null,
"alternate_titles": [
"The Fisherman"
],
"is_highlight": false,
"updated_at": "2026-03-27 00:04:08.779000"
}
}