Paintings in Paris, Fresh, Pure, and Lovely

The little known Custodia Foundation’s exhibition of open-air painting is a joy.

T rue to Nature: Open-air Painting in Europe, 1780-1870 is the straightforward, even banal title of an extraordinary exhibition, shown at an extraordinary place few Americans, I think, even know. The show of 115 small paintings, all done outdoors, with the subject before the artist, is at the Custodia Foundation, a museum, archive, and think tank on rue de Lille in Paris. I’d never visited. I knew it for its collection of Old Master drawings and prints, its 40,000-item archive of letters written by artists, and its Dutch founder, Frits Lugt.

Lugt (1884–1970) compiled the definitive catalogue of collector marks for drawings and prints. Doesn’t sound Gertrude Ederle snazzy, I know, but it’s essential. He deciphered thousands of small, stamped symbols or initials, almost always on the back of prints and drawings, identifying who owned them and creating the foundation for provenance and collection-history studies. Lugt might not have been good fodder for a Hollywood movie, though Nazis and Rembrandt figure in his life, and those artist letters are sometimes steamy. Still, he was a child prodigy, writing a biography of Rembrandt at age 14, illustrated with his own drawings. And he’s the art historian with the most scholarly citations to his name.

Step by step, though. The exhibition begins in 1780, a bit of an arbitrary date, because the Enlightenment attends to religion, a staple of art, but also, and this is new, to nature, science, and empiricism. Portability and wanderlust aren’t new for artists but, by this time, travel got easier, even if it involved a trip to the woods or the coast. Artists craved new subject matter, especially, as time passed, wild and woolly subjects. Impressionism hardly annihilates the taste for nature but, as we’ll see, it changes it. It changes the terms of plein air painting. The cacophony called the 20th century makes it a sideline.

Saturated as we are by Impressionism, Abstract Expressionism, and Hollywood biopics, improvisational painting doesn’t seem special to us. The first section of True to Nature displays about a dozen sketches of artists working, most painted by artist friends. Edmé-Adolphe Fontaine’s Isidore Dagnan at His Easel is my favorite for its élan. It’s tiny, 7 by 9 inches. Almost everything in the show is small, but this, I think, is very small indeed. Artists working outdoors, often far from their studios, packed lightly. Palettes were smaller, colors reduced in number, and fewer brushes made the trip. Almost all of these paintings are on paper, not canvas. Paper was lighter and cheaper. Fontaine’s picture has the look of a tribute, given Dagnan’s sassy, high-style hat, which helps us date the undated work to the 1850s.

The curator was smart in selecting this theme as the exhibition’s first and displaying artist equipment along with pictures of artists at work. The task at hand — painting outdoors — governed the artist’s tools, and the tools available define what the artist can make. I’d add fingers to the tool kit. André Giroux used his fingers to manipulate the paint in the sky in delectable-on-all-counts Santa Trinità dei Monti in the Snow, from the late 1820s, a rarest-of-rare Roman snow scene. Just the pressure of his touch modeled the paint’s viscosity, affecting how light reflected off the surface.

After this “how to” section, the exhibition unfolds in sections devoted to trees, water, rocks and grottoes, volcanoes, skies, Rome, the Roman Campagna, and views from rooftops and windows. Some of the subjects are expansive, some microscopic, some in our Rolodex of images like Vesuvius or the Colosseum, but most anonymous or quotidian. Each section is a tiny gourmet feast of paint, pure paint, in gobs, dabs, and sweeps.

I won’t profile every section. The catalogue is very, very good, with essays on each in an attractive book of 200 pages. Each essay is scholarly and packed with gems of observation. Mary Morton, the curator of French painting at the National Gallery in Washington, tells us that Giroux’s Forest Interior with a Painter, Civita Castellana, from the late 1820s, presents the artist “poised before his subject like a conductor before an orchestra, ready to subject an acquiescent nature to his creative will.”

Giroux conveys something that’s grand, mundane, and private. These sketches, even the ones that seem polished, were, to the artists, note-taking. The art in the show was never exhibited by the artists, put on the market by the artists, or even seen by their makers as autonomous works of art. Very few evolved into finished studio paintings, though here and there a motif, once an aide-mémoire, appears as a passage, almost never as the sole subject. So, we’re seeing the artist’s private musings or struggles or experiments. Surely tens of thousands were made just during the 90 years covered by True to Nature. Almost all are lost, trashed by the artist or whoever emptied his hovel after he died.

“Treeness” is, we find, hard to do. Until around 1800, trees were, well, there, as inconveniences, financial resources, or, when gathered as forests, scary. Naturalists, chemists, and botanists started to understand the codependency of trees and humanity. Before long, the French referred to trees as “children” or “friends,” and the English thought of them as pets. Trees were noble and, artists learned, variegated. Oaks were bizarrely forked and tortuous, ash trees elegant. A fallen, dead tree could look like the skeleton of a hero killed in battle, once a bruiser or a prince, now forlorn.

A good botany lesson and some nature mysticism aside, this section ends with a well-placed jab at Impressionism. The exhibition takes us, after all, to 1870, with the first Impressionist salon only four years away. The trees of Renoir, Monet, and Sisley, though these painters admired the tree masters of the Barbizon school such as Rousseau and Corot, lose a lot. They’re no longer picturesque or grand. They’re no longer friends or pets. They don’t invite narrative or mystery. Renoir’s son, Jean, in his biography of his father, said the Impressionists severed nature from emotion. They sought transient effects and the sensations the artist experienced, leaving trees as smatterings of forms and line. “Renoir’s trees are no more capable of thought than his models,” he noted. Well said, and so true.

If trees, rocks, grottoes, and ruins were still, water and clouds moved. Water is ubiquitous, powerful, and essential. Jean-Joseph-Xavier Bidauld shows us that water can come from anywhere and goes where it wants in his very polished view of Tivoli in 1788. Carl Frederik Sørenson’s Rough Seas beside a Jetty, from 1849, delivers from his high viewpoint both portraits of dozens of riled waves, each crest, plume, and explosion of spray different, and coalescing into a total mood. Water has weight and force, but a cloud’s intangible and ephemeral.

Constable is well represented in the show. He painted Cloud Study: Stormy Sunset, from 1821, 8 by 10 inches, in less than an hour, applying wet paint on wet paint, passages of ochre, orange, anthracite, and mouse gray mixing or living side by side to convey movement. Lights and darks give us depth. It looks like a snapshot. Georges Michel’s View of Paris, from Meudon (undated, but the artist died in 1843) is, I think, the biggest work in the show. It’s four large pieces of paper glued on wood, painted in every shade of gray, and what he called a “meteorological symphony.” Painting outdoors, and showing resourcefulness, he used the top of a bottle cork to make shapes conveying scrubby trees.

Aside from the first section on artist materials, True to Nature doesn’t dictate a route. The labels are small and convey tombstone information. The museum provides a small booklet, like a program at the opera, describing each painting in more detail. This is smart and handy. I wish more museums did this. I’m a sucker for volcano pictures — I like disaster movies — so I savored closeups of red-hot, flowing lava and molten rock by Jean-Charles Rémond and Giuseppe De Nittis. Vesuvius Chic dates to the discovery of Pompeii and Herculaneum in the 1770s, but shock-and-awe volcano art is a Romantic-era staple. Even a safely distant view such as Johan Christian Clausen Dahl’s Neapolitan Coast with Vesuvius in Eruption, done in 1820, is eerie and unsettling.

I didn’t realize when I first visited the show and, later, read the catalogue that True to Nature recognizes Philip Conisbee for pulling small, plein-air painting into the realm of recognition and scholarship. Philip was the curator of French painting at the National Gallery, a friend, mentor, and scholar I admired a lot. He and I happened to be in Paris at the same time in 2001 and had dinner together on what happened to be my birthday. He’d either just bought The Island and Bridge of San Bartolomeo, Rome, by Corot, or he’d just seen it at Wildenstein’s art dealership. It’s in the True to Nature exhibition and painted around 1825. Conisbee thought the acquisition was the peak of his career.

I don’t know whether or not this is true, since so many great things came to the National Gallery under his watch. I loved seeing it, but I think Corot’s Rome oil sketches, and they aren’t that rare, are so moving. They’re quiet and rapturous, with a restrained and correctly Roman palette and each wall, window, arch, and roof presented as an autonomous, authoritative plane. Still, it’s evanescent. And it’s a springboard to Cézanne, who painted in cubes and rectangles, and Picasso, who painted the bones and lines of things. Not every quickly painted sketch is about motion. This picture’s magic is in its calibration.

Rome as a theme isn’t arbitrary or overwrought. Rome, artists from the Renaissance to the birth of Modernism believed, had the look of experience. It existed as a motif of variousness in light and architecture, and as a teacher. It’s rooted, timeless, and a stage inviting experimentation and self-discovery. That makes Rome unique and explains its draw for artists.

As tiny but much fluffier is another Roman scene, Giroux’s Roman snow picture. I love the palette of blues and creams and the oddness of it, and it beats Monet and Sisley, also painters of snow, by 50 years.

I call True to Nature extraordinary for a few reasons. Most of us know Corot and Constable, and there are nice Turners in the exhibition, but I didn’t know many of the artists or hadn’t thought about them in a long time. Learning something new is a gift. The book’s great, and the organization by theme rather than chronology keeps the focus on the motif and the artist’s idiosyncrasy, not on linear art history. I’ve written many times about my love of zaftig painting, which is juicy, textured, vivacious paint surfaces. Little things can pack a punch, too. In our age of gigantism, it’s never bad to observe this fact. As much as I believe in the autonomy of the object, every work of art comes from an artist and his or her creativity and experience. The exhibition gives due respect to both artist and object, uniting them with coherence and sparkle.

The Custodia Foundation is open to the public. It’s in a Haussmann-era mansion and feels like a club or a house museum, though it’s neither. It’s cozy and accessible. The collection holds 7,000 drawings and 15,000 prints, almost all European and most acquired by Lugt. All genres are there. It owns impressions of all of Rembrandt’s etchings, but it’s deep in many other niches.

The savant Lugt was working for an Amsterdam auction house by the time he was a teenager. He later compiled the nine-volume catalogue of Dutch and Flemish drawings at the Louvre. He and his wife waited out World War II at Oberlin College. There, and in traveling across America, Lugt learned about American philanthropy, especially the almost exclusively American phenomenon of the collector-based museum.

Thus the Custodia Foundation was born in 1947. Lugt is to be seen as a prodigy and force of nature but in scholarship, not in music, and his Mennonite work ethic was of Olympian breadth and depth. When I was there, I spent a morning with Ger Luijten, the foundation’s charismatic director. He’s Old School, like me. The place’s collecting during his era focuses on painted sketches like these in the show. The foundation organized the show with the National Gallery and the Fitzwilliam at Cambridge, using work almost entirely from these museums, its own art, and a private collection.

These objects can speak to connoisseurs as private diaries of artists they know deeply and to people who simply love painting. I love it when that kind of reach happens.