LE SALEVE PAINTED BY THEODORE ROUSSEAU

THEODORE ROUSSEAU  (1812-1867)  

  Mont Salève (1, 379 m - 4,524 ft)

France  (Haute-Savoie) 

In Falaises du Salève près de Genève,1834, oil on paper laid down on panel, 

Private collection - Gallery 19C, Beverly Hills  

The Mountain 

Le  Mont Salève (1,379 m - 4,524 ft) is a mountain of the French Prealps located in the departement of Haute-Savoie (France). It is also called the "Balcony of Geneva". Geographically, the Salève is a mountain of the French Prealps but geologically a part of the Jura chain, as the Vuache is.

Below the Salève is the Geneva urban area where more than 700,000 people live. The Salève consists of the Pitons, the Grand and the Petit Salève, and culminates at 1379 meters at the Grand Piton. It is accessible by a cable car since 1932 (rebuilt in 1983), the Salève stretches between Étrembières in the north and the suspension bridge de la Caille in the south. Between 1892 and 1935, the Salève was served by the first electric rack railway in the world.

The eastern side of the Salève dives under the molasse of the Bornes Massif while the abrupt mountain slope facing Geneva is subject to erosion. The vegetation - or its absence - enhances the limestone's layers. This side of the mountain is slit by several narrow and deep gorges, among which the Grande Varappe, which at the end of the 19th century gave its name to the activity of rock climbing in French. This discipline developed intensely there, at a time when it was only beginning.

The Monnetier valley, separating the Petit and the Grand Salève, is due to glaciary erosion. Modern geologists now think that this valley was dug by the subglaciary currents in a fissured region between the Petit and the Grand Salève, and not by the Arve as was assumed earlier.

The Salève occurs on one of the first European paintings depicting a realistic landscape, La Pêche Miraculeuse by Konrad Witz created in 1444 already posted on this blog.

The painter 

Etienne- Pierre-Théodore Rousseau was a French painter of the Barbizon school.  Not to be confused with Henri Rousseau (called Le Douanier), he was born in Paris, of a bourgeois family and received  t first a business training, but soon displayed aptitude for painting.  The influence of classically trained artists was against them, and not until 1848 was Rousseau presented adequately to the public.

In 1848, Rousseau  he took up his residence in the forest village of Barbizon, and spent most of his remaining days in the vicinity. He was now able to obtain fair sums for his pictures (but only about one-tenth of their value thirty years after his death), and the number of his admirers increased. He was still ignored by the authorities, for while Narcisse Virgilio Diaz was made Chevalier of the Legion of Honour in 1851,  Rousseau was left undecorated at this time, but was nominated and awarded the Cross soon afterwards. 

At the Exposition Universelle of 1853, where all Rousseau's rejected pictures of the previous twenty years were gathered together, his works were acknowledged to form one of the best of the many splendid groups there exhibited. But, after an unsuccessful sale of his works by auction in 1861, he contemplated leaving Paris for Amsterdam or London, or even New York.

Rousseau's pictures are always grave in character, with an air of exquisite melancholy. They are well finished when they profess to be completed pictures, but Rousseau spent so much time developing his subjects that his absolutely completed works are comparatively few. He left many canvases with parts of the picture realized in detail and with the remainder somewhat vague; and also a good number of sketches and water-color drawings. His pen work in monochrome on paper is rare. There are a number of good pictures by him in the Louvre, and the Wallace collection contains one of his most important Barbizon pictures. There is also an example in the Ionides collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.