
Read the visual description
We look across a waterlogged path at a line of rust-red and bronze-brown trees that nearly span the width of this horizontal landscape painting. The scene is loosely painted, which creates a blurred look. The land closest to us is in shadow and many details are difficult to make out, but pockets of bright, ice blue suggest water reflecting the pale sky above. The trees across from us have thin, spindly trunks and billowing dark red and brown canopies. A few swipes of brown, crimson red, and white suggest a person, perhaps on horseback, and perhaps a second person, a child, on the path under the trees. A line of shadow falls just beyond the trees, and a strip of brightly lit green lawn stretches back to the horizon, which comes a third of the way up the painting. More trees lining the horizon in the distance have ash-white trunks and copper-pink leaves. The blue sky above is veiled with a screen of thin fog-gray and parchment-white clouds.
National Gallery of Art · Painting
After the Rain
Théodore Rousseau
- Date
- c. 1850
- Medium
- oil on canvas
- Dimensions
- overall: 78.74 × 146.05 cm (31 × 57 1/2 in.) framed: 96.52 × 162.88 × 9.21 cm (38 × 64 1/8 × 3 5/8 in.)
- Classification
- Painting
- Accession number
- 2014.136.43
- Credit line
- Corcoran Collection (William A. Clark Collection, 1926)
- Time span
- 1826 to 1850
- Department
- CF
Subjects and terms
- painted surface
- French
- Romantic
- Acquired after publication of French Paintings of the Nineteenth Century. Part I: Before Impressionism [1800-1859]
- Country landscape
- landscape
Provenance
Edwards, Paris. (his sale, Hotel Drouot, Paris, 7 March 1870, no. 32). C.G. Candano, Paris;[1] purchased 1899 by William A. Clark [1839-1925], New York; bequest 1926 to the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington; acquired 2014 by the National Gallery of Art. [1] According to Dana H. Carroll, _Catalogue of Objects of Fine Art and Other Properties at the Home of William Andrews Clark, 962 Fifth Avenue_, Part I, Unpublished manuscript, n.d. (1925): 148, no. 107.
NGA object ID 195088. Collection metadata is reproduced under CC0. This work is included because its NGA published-image record is marked open access; visitors should recheck the source record before substantial reuse.