Constant Troyon

Constant Troyon: The Painter Undone by a Bull

He was thirty-six and stuck. Two decades of painting flowers onto porcelain had given him a hand of extraordinary refinement and no subject worth using it on, and six years of chasing Théodore Rousseau around the forest of Fontainebleau had produced competent landscapes that looked like other men's. Then Constant Troyon went to Holland and stood in front of Paulus Potter's *Young Bull*. He came home and painted cows for the rest of his life, and became one of the most sought-after artists in Europe.

Born Into the Porcelain Works

Troyon was born on 28 August 1810 in Sèvres, on the edge of Paris — the town that was, and is, synonymous with French porcelain. His father worked at the celebrated manufactory there, and the son went into the decorative studios as a boy. He stayed roughly twenty years.

This is the single most under-weighted fact about him. Troyon's formation was not the atelier and the plaster cast; it was industrial ornament, executed to a tolerance where a wobble ruins the object. He learned to lay colour precisely on a curved surface, to think in glaze, to finish. His first formal teacher, Alfred Riocreux, came from that same decorative world. Landscape painting began as what he did with his spare hours.

The Barbizon Detour

By the early 1830s he had fallen in with two men who would define French landscape for a generation: Théodore Rousseau and Jules Dupré. The introduction to that circle came through Camille Roqueplan, whose pupil Troyon became. He was also looking hard at the seventeenth-century Dutch, and particularly at Jacob van Ruisdael — the great painter of weather, of skies doing most of the work in a picture.

Through the 1840s he worked alongside Rousseau and Dupré at Barbizon, pursuing the naturalism that was their shared programme: paint the countryside as it is, not as the Academy would like it arranged. Between roughly 1840 and 1847 Troyon followed their approach faithfully. Faithfully is the problem. He was a first-rate technician operating inside another man's vision, and the work of those years is the least distinguishable of his career.

Holland, and the Animal

In 1846 Troyon travelled to the Netherlands. (Some accounts date the trip to 1847; the effect is not in dispute.) There he saw Paulus Potter's *Young Bull*, and studied Aelbert Cuyp and Rembrandt.

Potter's picture is a life-size bovine treated with the gravity normally reserved for a monarch — an animal painted as a *presence*, standing in real light, occupying real air. Something in it released Troyon. Animals moved from the middle distance of his landscapes into the centre of them, and it is precisely here, as the record has it, that "his true individuality is revealed." The decorator's precision finally had something to be precise about: hide, horn, the wet of a muzzle, the mass of a body absorbing afternoon sun.

The Great Decade

Everything that matters was painted between 1850 and 1864. *Oxen at Work*, *Returning to the Farm*, *Vallée de la Toucque, Normandy* — the titles are deliberately unliterary, and that is the point. Troyon's subject was labour and pasture at the exact hour when the light was doing something interesting, and he refused to dress it up in allegory.

The pictures scattered fast into the great collections and have stayed there: the Louvre, the Wallace Collection in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The National Galleries of Scotland alone holds *Cattle Grazing in Touraine* (1854–1857), *Return from Work* (around 1855) and *Sheep and Shepherd* from the 1850s. His later Normandy coast paintings — sea light, wide skies, cattle on the shore — went on to matter considerably to the Impressionists, who were learning to build a picture out of atmosphere rather than out of drawing.

Medals and an Emperor

Success arrived heavily. Troyon took five medals at the Paris Salon and was made a member of the Legion of Honour. Napoleon III bought his work — imperial patronage, the summit of the official French art system. For an ornamental porcelain painter from Sèvres, the ascent was close to vertical, and it made him one of the most commercially powerful artists in Europe.

He took a pupil, Émile van Marcke, who became the most celebrated of his followers and carried the cattle-in-landscape formula on into the second half of the century.

The Clouding

Then it stopped. Troyon died in Paris on 21 February 1865, aged fifty-four, unmarried, "after a term of clouded intellect." The nineteenth century's phrase is discreet to the point of uselessness — it names a decline of the mind without diagnosing it — but the shape is clear enough: the most bankable animal painter in France spent his final period unable to work as he had. He was buried in the Cimetière de Montmartre.

His mother outlived him, and she endowed a Troyon prize for animal painting at the École des Beaux-Arts. A parent turning a son's death into an annual prize for the thing he did best is not a small gesture.

Why Constant Is Called a Genius

The claim rests on craft and on eye, not on intellect, and the honest version says so plainly. Troyon proposed no theory of art and left no writings that anyone quotes. What he possessed was a manual and perceptual gift of a very high order: twenty years of porcelain decoration had trained a hand that could put down exactly the tone it intended, first time, on a surface that permits no correction. Transferred to canvas and pointed at living animals in open weather, that discipline produced pictures with an unusual physical conviction — the weight of an ox, the specific dullness of a wet flank, the way a Normandy sky sits on a field.

The stronger claim available to him is one of judgement rather than technique. Troyon spent a decade painting well inside another artist's idea and had the self-knowledge, at thirty-six, to recognise that a Dutch bull painted in 1647 showed him a better use for his abilities than anything his friends were doing. Very few accomplished mid-career artists can perform that operation on themselves. That act of redirection, not any single canvas, is the case for calling him exceptional.

The counter-case is real. He was a specialist who found a formula — livestock, pasture, luminous sky — and repeated it profitably for fifteen years under imperial patronage, and specialists in a saleable genre rarely wear well. Rousseau and Millet are still argued about; Troyon is admired and shelved. His influence on the Impressionists was atmospheric rather than intellectual, absorbed by artists who went far past him. Genius of the hand and the eye: yes, defensibly. Genius as an originating mind: no.

Legacy

The Barbizon painters taught France to look at its own countryside without embarrassment, and Troyon supplied the animals — not as staffage or sentiment but as substantial living things standing in real light. That is his contribution, and it is enough. The prize in his name went on being awarded, van Marcke carried the manner forward, and the cattle keep grazing in Paris, London, New York and Edinburgh, in the best rooms in the building.

Achievements

• Knight of the Legion of Honour — 1849
• Knight of the Order of Leopold — 1860
• Notable work: Sheep in a forest
• Notable work: Oxes watching to tillage, morning sky
• Movement: Barbizon school