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A leafless, ash-white tree trunk has fallen from a broken stump into the wide V of a neighboring tree at the edge of a body of water near a verdant forest in this horizontal landscape painting. The fallen trunk creates a diagonal from near the lower left corner to the upper right. As it fell, it sheared off a substantial branch from a neighboring tree with a dark trunk. The bark where the damaged branch has pulled away is honey-orange, the same color as the leaves at the canopy, which has been pinned under the fallen trunk. Trees, vines, and other vegetation fill the space around and beyond this pair. In the lower right corner of the painting, vines grow over a broken stump, which deep in shadow. Between the stump and fallen tree, the peanut-brown surface of the water is smooth. Tiny in scale beneath the fallen tree and easily overlooked, there are two men and a dog in a boat. One man stands at the back of the boat and pushes it along with a long pole. He wears a tall, brown, cloth hat, a white shirt rolled up to the elbows under a blue vest, and loose-fitting pants. A second man wears a flat-topped, white hat with a black brim, a long, forest-green jacket, and tight-fitting slate-blue pants. He braces a rifle against one shoulder and shoots into the forest. The dog is white with brown spots, and it stands with its front paws on the edge of the boat, presumably ready to spring after the target. A patch of blue sky with puffy white clouds is seen above the trees in the upper left corner. The artist signed and dated the work in the lower right corner: “H. Vernet Rome 1833.”

Horace Vernet

Hunting in the Pontine Marshes, 1833

West Building, Main Floor — Gallery 93

Medium

oil on canvas

Dimensions

overall: 100 × 137 cm (39 3/8 × 53 15/16 in.)

framed: 136.53 × 173.36 × 16.51 cm (53 3/4 × 68 1/4 × 6 1/2 in.)

Credit Line

Chester Dale Fund

Accession Number

1989.3.1

Artists / Makers

Horace Vernet (artist) French, 1789 - 1863

Image Use

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Inscription

lower left: H. Vernet / Rome 1833 [or Roma?]

Provenance

Pierre-Hippolyte Aumont [d. 1865], by 1846.[1] Probably (sale, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, 6 May 1870, no. 4, as Chasse dans les marais Pontins).[2] (sale, Ader Picard Tajan, Paris, 12 December 1988, no. 78); purchased 18 January 1989 by NGA.

[1] In a Paris sale, Tableaux modernes provenant en partie de la collection de M. D***, 29 March 1862, a painting by Horace Vernet, Chase au marais, figured under no. 53. The dimensions, given as 51 x 41 cm, are so much smaller than those of the picture in the NGA that a confusion with it seems not possible. The painting was lent by Aumont to the 1846 exhibition at the Bazar Bonne-Nouvelle.

[2] This sale reference did not appear in the NGA's systematic catalogue entry on the painting (Lorenz Eitner, French Paintings of the Nineteenth Century. Part I: Before Impressionism, New York and Oxford, 2000: 352-355), at which time the location of the painting's pendant, Departure for the Hunt in the Pontine Marshes, was not known. When the pendant appeared at auction in 2003 (it was subsequently purchased by the NGA and is now 2004.38.1), the sale catalogue cited Bruno Chenique's suggestion that NGA 1989.3.1 and NGA 2004.38.1 were lot numbers 4 and 5 in this 1870 sale.

Associated Names

Ader Picard Tajan
Aumont, Pierre-Hippolyte
Drouot, Hôtel

Exhibition History

1846: Exposition au profit de l'Association des Artistes, Peintres, et Sculpteurs, Bazar Bonne-Nouvelle, Paris, 1846, no. 70.

1999: Masterpieces from the National Gallery of Art, Washington, Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art; Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, 1999, no. 1, repro.

2003: Constable to Delacroix: British Art and the French Romantics, Tate Britain, London; Minneapolis Inst. of Arts; Met. Mus. of Art, New York, 2003-2004, no. 93 (U.S. title: Crossing the Channel: British and French Painting in the Age of Romanticism).

Bibliography

1995: Fondation Taylor. Le Baron Taylor, L'Association des artistes et l'exposition du Bazar Bonne-Nouvelle en 1846. Paris, 1995: 35, fig. 87, 283.

2000: Eitner, Lorenz. French Paintings of the Nineteenth Century, Part I: Before Impressionism. The Collections of the National Gallery of Art Systematic Catalogue. Washington, D.C., 2000: 352-355, color repro.