ABSTRACT
Around 1830, a few French art critics began to recognize a new form of landscape painting. The apologists for a new school of landscape seem to have set themselves against the entire machinery for the production, circulation and use of painting. A revolution had taken place in landscape painting like the other branches of art. Paintings of conventional nature, those respectable well-made landscapes, well kept, somewhat stilted, without brambles or thorns, with their well-ordered compositions have all but disappeared from the Salon. The nation might celebrate its revolutionary heritage but could do so safely with the realm of art. Gustave Larroumet, writing in 1895, noted how the political merit of landscape painting during this period rested not so much on some tendentious political or artistic theory but on a painter’s insight as evidenced in a picture’s ‘execution’.
