Trees in the Park at Saint-Cloud

This unfinished oil sketch on canvas is by Paul Huet, an important figure in French 19th-century landscape painting. While a student in the 1820s, he often painted outdoors in the park at Saint-Cloud, in the west of Paris. He continued to visit the park throughout his life, and this sketch probably dates from the 1850s. It contains cadmium yellow or orange, not widely available until at least the 1840s.

A pioneer of Romantic landscape painting, Huet was particularly interested in capturing the changing moods evoked by landscape through the play of light. Although he abandoned this sketch, it shows his method of painting, particularly his use of thickly painted bands of bright and dark greens to recreate the dense foliage of the towering trees that almost fill the canvas. He was a friend of the British landscape artist Richard Parkes Bonington, and of Eugène Delacroix, and his working method and technique prefigured the work of the Barbizon artists of the mid-nineteenth century, and the later Impressionists.

Text: © The National Gallery, London

Painting photographed in its frame by Google Arts & Culture, 2023.