The Cave in a Cliff near Granville 1833

Here we see Theodore Rousseau's "The Cave in a Cliff near Granville", painted in oil, in which the artist departs from traditional landscape art. Rousseau lived and worked in a time of massive social and economic changes; he experienced the 1848 Revolution in France and he frequently visited rural areas. The cave and the sea, as depicted here, are liminal spaces, neither land nor sea. Rousseau seems interested in states of transition. Instead of the sublime, we find a landscape viewed at eye level, which invites the viewer to consider their personal, physical relationship to nature. The rich browns and ochres that dominate the painting create a melancholic and dream-like atmosphere, as if the cave is a metaphor for the complexities of human emotion. Rousseau asks us to find ourselves in the landscape, our identities shaped by the earth from which we come.