DIAZ DE LA PEÑA, Narcisse Virgile - b. 1807 Bordeaux, d. 1876 Menton - WGA

DIAZ DE LA PEÑA, Narcisse Virgile

(b. 1807 Bordeaux, d. 1876 Menton)

French landscape painter of the Barbizon School. He was born of Spanish parents in Bordeaux. His earlier works were Romantic compositions in the manner of Delacroix, but later he became a painter of the forest. He spent much time at Barbizon and although he is the least exalted of the half-dozen great artists who are usually grouped round that name, he sometimes produced works of the highest quality.

At the age of ten Diaz became orphan, and misfortune dogged his earlier years. His foot was bitten by reptile in Meudon wood, near Sèvres, where he had been taken to live with some friends of his mother. The bite was badly dressed, and ultimately it cost him his leg. Afterwards his wooden stump became famous. About 1831 Diaz encountered Theodore Rousseau, four years his junior. At Fontainebleau, Diaz found Rousseau painting his wonderful forest pictures, and determined to paint in the same way.

Diaz exhibited many pictures at the Paris Salon, and was decorated in 1851. During the Franco-German War he went to Brussels. After 1871 he became fashionable, his works gradually rose in the estimation of collectors.

A Nymph's Gift in the Bois de Lislé

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Clearing in the Woods

Though figure painting would always remain important for Diaz, it is his landscapes of the 1850s, 60s, and 70s, particularly those of Fontainebleau Forest, for which the artist is most remembered.

Formerly this painting was in the Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia. It was sold in 2010 to benefit the Charles Knox Smith Art Acquisition Fund.

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Forest Scene

This canvas depicts a forest scene with a great, sunny oak and fisherman at a pond.

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Landscape with a Pine-tree

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Road in the Wood

Diaz de la Peña painted genre scenes in the spirit of the late Rococo, biblical compositions, and scenes from Eastern life, among other subjects. But his talent manifested itself most fully in the landscapes he created while associated with artists of the Barbizon school. Th�odore Rousseau taught him to paint great sturdy trees, although Diaz’s manner seems more reconciled and even charmingly naive.

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The Forest in Fontainebleau

In France the search for national identity, the concern to put down roots in one’s own territory, had been in evidence since the 1830s among such artists as Th�odore Rousseau and his successors, prompted by the English example of John Constable and Richard Parkes Bonnington or that of the seventeenth-century Dutch masters. In the process, they deliberately rejected any reference to the Italian landscape, the very basis of historical landscape, which had been an academic genre since 1818 and was to be swept away as obsolete in the 1863 reform of the �cole des Beaux-Arts. They likewise detached themselves from the picturesque quality associated with Romantic trips to the French provinces in order to concentrate on essentials, namely the representation of nature. Charles Le Roux, Jules Dupr�, and Narcisse Virgile Diaz de la Peña encountered Th�odore Rousseau before 1840. The so-called Barbizon School was dominated by the restless and highly poetic personality of Rousseau, who finally settled in the little town on the edge of the forest of Fontainebleau in 1848.

This painting shows Diaz, the landscapist, at his best. He obtained spectacular effects by means of impasto combined with colour contrasts.

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Venus and Adonis

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