The empty landscapes of the Landes

Théodore Rousseau, Swamp in the Landes, after 1844

I have been so impressed by Kelly Presutti's Land into Landscape that I can't resist one more post on it, highlighting her chapter on 'Wetlands'. Here is a painting she writes about by Théodore Rousseau, the Barbizon painter whose 'ecological' approach to painting entangled trees, untouched by the state's foresters, features in her chapter on 'Forests'.  The Landes, remote from Paris and considered a backward, featureless waste had never attracted landscape painters until Rousseau and Jules Dupré made a trip to the region in 1844. Rousseau's landscape is very different from his dense depictions of Fontainebleau Forest. 

Silvery-white brushstrokes glance over the surface of the image without gathering in any defined area. Dragging a thinly loaded brush horizontally across the canvas in short strokes, the artist evoked the sparse, fleeing sensations of this liminal region. Two-thirds of the canvas is devoted to the sky, but it is a sky that is in intense dialogue with the ground below, picking up on those waterways and creating parallel streams of light and dark above. There are no foreground framing elements; on the contrary, the foreground passes hazily into the middle ground and distance without clear delineation. The scene has regional details, including the scrawny Atlantic pine, a loosely penned-in area with what are likely cattle, and in the far distance what could be sails, as though our gaze might extend to the ocean. It is difficult to measure or grasp the distance covered. The details serve not to establish scale but instead to open up the image outward. Rousseau created an expansive vision, a positive counterpart to the uneasy vastness experienced by earlier travel writers.

Kelly Presutti goes on to discuss late nineteenth century efforts to drain the Landes and cover it with pine trees, a subject covered in Graham Robb's fine 2007 book The Discovery of France. He explains that not a single patch of the original Landes now remains: 

The empty landscapes of the Landes are now known only through the photographs of Félix Arnaudin, a shy ethnologist who gave up a career in the Highways and Bridges to walk and cycle through the Grande Lande (the area north and west of Mont-de-Marsan) from the 1870s to 1921 with his heavy German camera, recording a disappearing way of life. He paid local people, who thought him insane, to recreate the scenes he remembered from his childhood in Labouheyre. 'The forest that blocks the view, narrows the mind', he wrote, as though the Landes was being plunged into the darkness of a fading memory. 

Graham Robb reproduces this photograph with the caption: 'A sombre desert where the cicada sings and the bird is silent, where all human habitation disappears' (V. Hugo). Shepherds in the Landes, at La Mouleyre, near Commensacq, on one of the few surviving patches of the original Landes. The encroaching forest of oak and pine can just be seen on the horizon. A shepherd on stilts could travel at the speed of a trotting horse.

Photographs like this are fascinating but Presutti also reproduces some of Arnaudin's extraordinary landscape views, so minimal they resemble Sugimoto seascapes. He inscribed a horizon line onto his camera lens in order to achieve this consistent framing. Rather than focus on detail like the flowering grasses, or highlight features like buildings or trees, Arnaudin wanted to capture and preserve the landscape's emptiness. In these images and his writing on the Landes he was 'reversing the terms of beauty and ugliness established by earlier commentators' and lauding 'the appeal of the desert, the dream of solitude, and the pleasure of the uninterrupted expanse.'   

A page of Arnaudin photographs from Land into Landscape  by Kelly Presutti