Posted inArt

“Tormented by Several Devils”: Théodore Rousseau’s Wild Styles

Consider “Study for The Forest in Winter at Sunset,” a work in oil and charcoal on brown paper by Théodore Rousseau, the 19th-century French painter now under scrutiny at the Morgan Library & Museum. Although it was done between 1845 and 1850, it feels like something Anselm Kiefer might come up with for a 12-foot-wide canvas: a controlled chaos of bare, twisting tree limbs in slashes of paint as dark and smoldering as charred bitumen.