Narcisse Virgile Diaz de la Peña (1808-1876) Elegant in a Forest

Oil on wood, signed Díaz de la Pena on the reverse. We thank Michel Rodrigue for confirming the attribution of this painting to Díaz.

Measurements
Panel: 24.5 x 14 cm
Frame: 35 x 24 cm

The son of a Spanish exile, Narcisse Virgile Díaz de la Peña spent his youth wandering: from Bordeaux, his hometown, to Paris, via England and Languedoc. As a young apprentice in a Parisian porcelain factory, he learned the use of paint and met the painters Jules Dupré, Raffet, and Troyon. Self-taught, he attempted to paint the immediate surroundings of Paris before studying the Luminist painters at the Louvre: Correggio, Rembrandt, and Prud'hon. From 1831, the date of his first Salon exhibition, until his death, he achieved relatively rapid success with collectors and the artists who would become his friends: Théodore Rousseau, Corot, Millet, and Daumier. Due to illness, the landscape painter missed the adventure of the journey and, an admirer of Hugo and Delacroix, saw only Decamps's Orient. In 1836 (the year he met Rousseau), he fell in love with the forest of Fontainebleau, where he found most of his carefully chosen motifs. Soon, painters would gather around Rousseau, who had settled in the village of Barbizon, breaking away from the rigid framework of academic landscape painting. It was a liberation that preserved the dramatic exaltation of the Romantics, combining it with a profound sense of reality. The spectacle of a clearing or a forest floor was imbued with a passion stronger than visual anecdote. Along with Rousseau and Daubigny, Diaz helped remove the theatrical picturesqueness of the great panoramas of Romanticism from landscapes; even more original was his understanding of the purely pictorial effect. He knew the resources of the material he wielded with a feverish brush. Like a smoldering fire, the red light insinuates itself between the masses of green in the thick, burning shadow. The entire canvas is imbued with a mysterious light, with "dazzling solar jewels" (Focillon). Within the forests and gardens, small, barely defined figures emerge—fairies, gypsies, nymphs, or elegant ladies—as if emerging from a dreamlike vision.
"Díaz's painting is a dream in an enchanted land. These forests and these voluptuous creatures are encountered only in hashish visions, when one is in perfect health and happiness. It is to this fairy-tale charm that Díaz's success must be attributed; for his painting itself, or rather his execution, instilled a certain fear in the bourgeoisie, who generally preferred finished, clear, and easily understood paintings." In his 1846 Salon, Théophile Thoré offers us a comprehensive overview of his protégé, Narcisse Virgile Díaz de la Peña.

Our painting depicts a sunlit garden or forest clearing where a group of elegant ladies in sumptuous dresses are amusing themselves and joking with one another. These small, delightful genre scenes are part of a series of small panels that Díaz produced around the mid-19th century, much loved by the public and which he himself offered for sale, the so-called "Díaz sales." Some of these even bear the "Vente Diaz" seal. In our case, the panel is signed on the back and, to ensure maximum certainty of the attribution, it was submitted to Michel Rodrigue, an expert on Diaz and the Barbizon School and a member of the Union Francais Experts (UFE). Michel Rodrigue has examined more than 30,000 works from the Barbizon School to date.