Painted en plein air between 1856-1863, the delight of this small study is the loose elegance of Bellel’s brushwork and subtlety of colouring. Highly textured pigment animates the bristling foliage of the hillside with a tactile pleasure, as branches protrude into the sky, scratched with a brush end into the paint layer. Licks of white suggest clouds with an instinctual immediacy, and translucent dashes of brown render a deep canopy and moss on the dark rocks below. Such varied application of pigment even within this smaller composition reveals Bellel’s artistic dexterity. Working quickly to lay down the landscape in motion before him, the technical and material variations of the composition reveal the artist’s mind at work. The painting is signed, as the branches are shaped, with the end of Bellel’s paintbrush.

 

The work was created in a period of crucial development in the artist’s ouevre, after his 1856 visit to Algeria inspired an Orientalist approach which would define his career. Though the present landscape is more familiar of Bellel’s favourite Vosges region than those of Northern Africa which closely followed, the same dramatic realism with which he evoked these foreign views can be seen here in the jagged formation of the subsiding rock face and bold distortion of the tree trunks.

 

The partial supplier’s stamp to the panel is that used between 1856-1863 when Deforge’s firm became Deforge et Carpentier, based at 8 Boulevard Montmartre. Artists often exhibited their works in the windows of the suppliers on the busy streets around Boulevard Montmartre, which Théophile Gautier described as, ‘a sort of permanent Salon’ (Gautier, p. 10). The leading Impressionists would frequent Deforge et Carpentier in the 1870s, among them Pierre Auguste Renoir and Alfred Sisley.

 

JEAN-FRANÇOIS-JOSEPH BELLEL (Paris 1816-1898 Paris):

Jean-François-Joseph Bellel was born in 1816 within the 9th arrondissement of Paris, the son of an architect. His teenage tutelage began in 1835 in the studios of the landscape painters Théodore Caruelle d’Aligny and Pierre Justin Ouvrié, who would later become the young artist’s foster father. D’Aligny himself had studied under the eminent landscapist Jean-Victor Bertin among others, an inheritance which prompted Bellel’s debut the following year at the 1836 Paris Salon, where he would exhibit throughout his six-decades career. Bellel entered the École des Beaux-Arts in 1845, and later exhibited in London and Vienna where he earned medals for his work. He was decorated with the Legion of Honour on 28 January 1860, and awarded the Jean Reynaud Prize in 1897. He was for a time the Assistant Custodian at the Palais de Luxembourg. Despite his extensive travel, Bellel kept his studio at 10 Rue Jean-Baptiste-Say in the 9th arrondissement, and died not far from his birthplace in November 1898.

 

It was at the height of Orientalism that Bellel developed an interest in North Africa, travelling extensively in the former French colonies of Egypt and Algeria on painting expeditions. The first work of this period dates to his 1856 visit to Algiers, after which came celebrated works including Arab Caravan, now in the collection of the Élysée Palace. Bellel’s milieu included Paris’ leading Orientalist artists and writers. The French poet and dramatist Théophile Gautier was a close friend with whom Bellel corresponded at length. Bellel travelled in company with contemporaries, and likely met fellow Orientalist Jules Laurens whilst studying together at the École des Beaux-Arts. He received a number of royal commissions in later life, and in 1860 an album of 20 charcoal drawings by the artist was presented to Napoleon III by the General Council of the Vosges, accompanied by text written by Gautier. A black chalk and bodycolour drawing of a woodland was later presented to Queen Victoria by François d’Orléans, Prince of Joinville, and is held at Windsor Castle. The French Senate houses a tapestry deriving in part from Bellel’s designs, who also created two large panels for the Hôtel de Ville, though these were destroyed during the Paris Commune of 1871.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY AND FURTHER READING: 

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Édouard Charton, ‘Un Paysage En Auvergne’, Le Magasin Pittoresque, 31, 1863: p. 205

Théophile Gautier, ‘La Rue Lafitte’, L’Artiste, 13.1, 1858: pp. 10-13

C. H. Stranahan, A History of French Painting from its Earliest to its Latest Practice (New York, N.Y.: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1888)