Oil Painting, 'Cows Drinking', Léon Victor Dupré, 1855

A herd of cows drinking from a pond that lies at the bottom of a grassy slope; a large cloudy sky above.

Bequeathed by Rev. Chauncey Hare Townshend

Bequeathed by Rev. Chauncey Hare Townshend, 1868.

Historical significance: This painting is a fine example of Victor Dupré's oeuvre. Victor was like his more famous brother, Jules Dupré, one of the leading members of the Barbizon school.
The present painting depicts a hilly landscape with a pond from which cows are drinking. The luminous palette, free and broken brushwork are characteristic of the Barbizon painters who were looking for the rendering of light in plein air.
Particularly interesting here is the vertical format and the bright light of the white clouds reflecting onto the surface of the pond. The cows appear however formless and more suggested than defined, their large bodies merging somehow with the scenery around them.
Dupré often peopled his compositions with cows in a style reminiscent of the 17th-century Dutch landscape paintings. The influence of 17th-century Dutch painting on the realist and Barbizon painters was quite vivid at the time.
Victor Dupré's art is characterised by a sense of great calm and peacefulness, which can be found in other examples of his work: for instance a Landscape with cows and figures in the Bowes Museum, County Durham, and a Paysage du Berri, Musée du paysage, Saint-Benoit-du-Sault.
This painting was bought by the Rev. Townshend and displayed in his villa in Lausanne (Switzerland). It completed there a large collection of 19th-century landscapes paintings and it is not unlikely that he knew personally the artist.

19th-century French art is marked by a succession of movements based on a more or less close relationship with nature. At the beginning of the century, Romantic artists were fascinated by nature they interpreted as a mirror of the mind. They investigated human nature and personality, the folk culture, the national and ethnic origins, the medieval era, the exotic, the remote, the mysterious and the occult. This movement was heralded in France by such painter as Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863). In its opposition to academic art and its demand for a modern style Realism continued the aims of the Romantics. They assumed that reality could be perceived without distortion or idealization, and sought after a mean to combine the perception of the individual with objectivity. This reaction in French painting against the Grand Manner is well represented by Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) who wrote a 'Manifesto of Realism', entitled Le Réalisme published in Paris in 1855. These ideas were challenged by the group of the Barbizon painters, who formed a recognizable school from the early 1830s to the 1870s and developed a free, broad and rough technique. They were mainly concerned by landscape painting and the rendering of light. The works of Narcisse Virgile Diaz de la Peña (1807-1876), Jules Dupré (1811-1889), Théodore Rousseau (1812-1867), Constant Troyon (1810-1865) and Jean-François Millet (1814-1875) anticipate somehow the plein-air landscapes of the Impressionists.

Léon-Victor Dupré (1816-1879) was born in Limoges and specialised in landscape paintings. He became one of the leading painters of the Barbizon school and had a very quiet life. He taught the animal painter Eugène Cottin (1840-1902).

This painting is a fine example of Victor Dupré's output. He painted mainly landscape paintings inahibited by cows and sometimes small figures. His technique, a luminous and broken brushwork, is characteristic of the Barbizon school.

1616-1869