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DESCRIPTION:
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The focus of this landscape view is a country road running down into the beholder’s direction and flanked by a grain-field and an overgrown elevation. A cart preceded by cattle approaches. The sharply lit middle-zone is closed off from behind by dense bushes, trees and verdant hills. Dark daunting clouds announce stormy weather. Beams of sunlight cast heavy shadows, thus further enhancing the dramatic effect. The present painting bears testimony to Michel’s admiration for Jacob van Ruisdael’s poetic landscape vision, which he brilliantly recreated here. The idyllic pictorial language and the precise technique suggest an early date of prior to circa 1820.
Georges Michel was the son of an employee at the market of Les Halles in Paris. Through the patronage of a local farmer general he was able to study painting. In Paris, he worked with M. de Grammont-Voulgy, Steward to the brother of Louis XVI, whom he accompanied to Switzerland in 1789 and with whom he also travelled to Germany. In the 1780s, Michel copied Dutch paintings in the collection of the leading dealer J.-B. P. Lebrun. Michel’s Salon debut was in 1791. In around 1800, he was restoring Old Masters for the Louvre. His close study of Rembrandt, Ruisdael, Jan van Goyen and Meindert Hobbema affected his own style. Michel stopped exhibiting at the Salon after 1814 and from 1820 became reclusive, relying on one patron, the Baron d’Ivry, who bought his entire output. Ultimately, the two men fell out over political differences after the July Revolution of 1830 after which d’Ivry, who was an amateur painter, became Michel’s main imitator. Michel rarely signed his works, stating that the ‘painting must please without the aid of a name or a label.’ Two years before his death the contents of the artist’s workshop, which included over a thousand studies and two thousand drawings, were put up for sale at public auction, allowing a younger generation of landscape artists to study his work. Consequently, Michel became a prime influence on the Barbizon painters. Although Michel deliberately eschewed fame, later critics have acknowledged the crucial role of his work in the development of modern landscape painting.
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