Lot 74: Louis Godefroy Jadin , French 1805 - 1882 PLAINE DE MONTFORT-L'AMAURY oil on canvas

indistinctly signed L. Godefroy Jadin (lower right) oil on canvas

measurements 45 1/2 by 89 in. alternate measurements 115.5 by 226 cm

Paris, Salon , 1834, no. 1015

A. Decamps, Le Musée: revue de Salon de 1834, Paris, 1834, pp. 90-91, 101, illustrated opp. p. 91
G. Laviron, Salon de 1834, Paris, 1834, pp. 344-45
G. Planche, Salon de 1834, reproduced in Études sur l'École française, 1855, Paris, pp. 264-65
H. Robert, "Le Destin d'une grande collection princière au XIXe siècle: L'Example de la galerie de tableaux du Duc d'Orléans, Prince Royal," Gazette des Beaux-Arts, July, 1991, p. 53
C. Puppin, "Tradition, Criticism and Landscape in the 1830s," Christie's, New York, Barbizon, Realist and French Landscape Paintings, May 6, 1998, p. 11 (introduction to sales catalogue)

Ferdinand-Philippe, le Duc d'Orléans, 1834 (acquired from the artist)
Mme. la Duchesse d'Orléans,1842 (by inheritance from the above)
Sale: Hôtel des ventes, Paris, Property of Mme. la Duchesse d'Orléans, January 18-21, 1853, lot 38
Henry Paul (acquired from the above sale)
Private Collection, California

Louis-Godefroy Jadin's Plaine de Montfort-l'Amaury has been missing from the public record since it left a French royal collection in 1853. Widely acclaimed as the landscape triumph of the Salon of 1834, Plaine de Montfort- l'Amaury is a major landmark in the history of nineteenth-century painting; and its recent rediscovery in America opens a window onto the extraordinary Salon exhibitions of the 1830s. Variously nicknamed L'Abreuvoir (The Watering Place) and La Mare (The Pond) for the pool that shimmers at the heart of the painting, Jadin's painting was heralded as the most striking landscape in a Salon whose other remarkable triumphs included Paul Delaroche's Execution of Lady Jane Grey (London, National Gallery) and Delacroix's Women of Algiers (Paris, Musée du Louvre), landmarks of the Romantic movement. With the horizon forced nearly to the top of the painting and the long line of cows silhouetted in the strongly angled light breaking dramatically across the foreground, Jadin organized a composition that was unquestionably deeply original. Plaine de Montfort-l'Amaury was immediately noticed by critics struggling to give order to a moment of great change in French painting. Gustave Planche and Alexandre Decamps analyzed the painting at great length, both critics drawing from Jadin's triumph the importance for a landscape artist to start from nature itself. Planche closed his remarks on the picture "this time, [Jadin] found a poem already made, and he has rendered it marvelously." Plaine de Montfort-l'Amaury was purchased after the Salon by the Duc d'Orléans, the young heir to the French throne and an ardent collector of contemporary painting. His position required that he observe a certain impartiality in his collecting, but his heart clearly belonged to the dawning Romantic movement. The Duc d'Orléans died an untimely death in 1842 in a carriage accident; and his father's reign came to an inglorious end in 1848, forcing the break-up of the Orléans collection. How the Plaine de Montfort- l'Amaury made its way to America is unknown. This catalogue entry was written by Alexandra Murphy.