Impressionism and Open-Air Painting
Rocks appear in the earliest examples of landscape paintings. The ﬁrst separate studies of rocks were painted in Italy in the late 18th century but it was the Barbizon School which made this motif a pre-eminent one, and it is not by chance that those painters chose to depict the Forest of Fontainebleau, where rock formations account for around a quarter of the surface area. These painters imbued their images with a sense of melancholy, solitude and devastation. In contrast, for American artists art and geology often went hand in hand. Towards the end of the 19th century Cézanne returned to the motif of rocks in order to analyse spatial construction without resorting to shading or perspective.
Paul Cézanne Forest with Boulders, c.1893
- Oil on canvas. 51 x 61 cm.
- Kunsthaus Zurich, Zurich. Switzerland
Bequest of Dr. Hans Schuler, 1920