Wheatfields 1865

Curator: This watercolor drawing before us is entitled "Wheatfields." Theodore Rousseau completed it around 1865. It resides here at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Editor: There's a striking melancholy to it. A broad, open landscape under a subdued sky. The texture in those fields looks coarse, real. It’s quite an unassuming landscape, but also quietly affecting. Curator: Rousseau was part of the Barbizon School, known for painting en plein air, capturing the transient qualities of light and atmosphere. The rise of Realism, which took the stage as the dominant art form, and a Romantic interest in nature really informed Rousseau's choice of this type of scenery. Editor: I'm drawn to the material reality, even in a watercolor. Those furrows plowed into the earth seem to hold more weight and more value than all the soft clouds up in the distance. Look how he renders those dense wheat heads, each brushstroke mimicking the way a plant grows toward the sun. It feels like documenting labor through material exploration. Curator: Rousseau was indeed committed to representing the dignity of rural labor and peasant life. We must understand how artists, writers and intellectuals started engaging with representing farmers as key subjects during this period to fully capture the value of an image like this. There was a huge shift during the nineteenth century. Editor: I agree, and for me, looking closely at how those depictions were made matters, too. Watercolors allowed artists to be on location, en plein air. The very method becomes embedded into the message about rural life and our connections with nature, with the land itself and its consumption, of course. Curator: Well, through this we've seen how seemingly straightforward representations of landscape actually carry social and historical importance, not just beauty. Editor: Indeed, we might have thought it to be a picture of the pastoral ideal. In fact, it asks how, by what material means, can an artwork shape the world?