Landscape Near Paris (c. 1840): Art, History and Details

Landscape Near Paris (c. 1840) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Georges Michel (French, 1763–1843).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

The location of this scene, probably near Paris, has not been identified with certainty. Unlike most painters of this time, Michel never traveled to Italy and focused only on depicting locations in France. Michel was always interested in Dutch art, however, and was nicknamed the "French Ruisdael"-a reference to the 17th-century Dutch landscape painter Jacob van Ruisdael (1628-1682). After about 1808, Michel explored personal interpretations of landscape, focusing on light, sky, and space. The brooding, vaguely threatening atmosphere in this painting embodies the Romantic notion that human beings are insignificant relative to the larger forces of nature.

Object facts

• Title: Landscape Near Paris
• Date: c. 1840
• Creator attribution: Georges Michel (French, 1763–1843)
• Culture: France, 19th century
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on fabric
• Dimensions: Framed: 105.6 x 146.4 x 9.6 cm (41 9/16 x 57 5/8 x 3 3/4 in.); Unframed: 88.8 x 129.5 cm (34 15/16 x 51 in.)
• Collection: Mod Euro - Painting 1800-1960
• Department: Modern European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1975.78

Collection credit

Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Noah L. Butkin

Further reading listed by the museum

• Lee, Sherman E. “The Year in Review for 1975.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 63, no. 2 (February 1976): 31–71.
• Talbot, William S. “Some French Landscapes: 1779-1842.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 65, no. 3 (March 1978): 75–91.
• Argencourt, Louise d', and Roger Diederen. Catalogue of Paintings. Pt. 4. European Paintings of the 19th Century. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1974.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.