Charles Emile Jacque (French, 1813-1894), Troupeau de Vaches a L'abreuvoir. Oil on canvas, 56-3/4 x 78-1/2 inches. Signed lower left.
Charles Emile Jacque painted Troupeau de Vaches & L'Abreuvoir about 1890, during the last decade of his life, as he introduced a new monumentality and an exceptional boldness of paint handling to the themes that had shaped his art for half a century. Returning to the Salon exhibitions after a twenty year absence, Jacque presented Troupeau de Vaches & L'Abreuvoir and the comparably large Berger et son Troupeau (Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, Virginia) to confirm his legacy as one of the century's foremost animal painters. Charles Jacque had been among the first artists to establish a permanent home in Barbizon, moving there from Paris with Jean-Francois Millet in 1849. Following his first success as an etcher and illustrator, Jacque turned increasingly to painting. By the early 1860s he enjoyed considerable fame and a growing international clientele as an animal painter. Jacque was particularly known for paintings of sheep and their shepherds along the forest edge and for his colorful scenes of the exotic chickens he raised himself. When one journalistic wit dubbed Jacque the 'Raphael of the sheep barn' the nickname was a recognition of both the occasional sentimentality of Jacque's imagery and the careful, precise style in which his early animal paintings were rendered. Jacque lived twenty years longer than most of his Barbizon contemporaries and watched the rural subjects they had pioneered be taken up by a wide field of younger artists more familiar with the avenues of Paris than the countryside. During the 1870s and 1880s, Jacque's commercial success afforded him the luxury of ignoring the competition and criticism of the Salon exhibition. In 1888, however, he made a dramatic return to the Salon with an immense painting of life-size sheep, that appear to move out over the frame edge. Albert Wolff, the influential critic for Le Figaro, heralded Jacque's return to the Salon with accolades. In 1891, Jacque collaborated with the dealer Paul Durrand-Ruel on a major one-man exhibition of his work. Troupeau de Vaches & L'Abreuvoir was included in the Durand-Ruel show and was featured as Jacque's Salon entry of 1892. With a scale of a major history painting and using heavily textured, strong, forceful touches of paint, Jacque has perfectly captured the individual characteristics, poses, movements and breeds of the cows, as well as evoking the heat of a summer day. The anonymous shepherdess guides her herd to the cool refreshment of a shaded pool. Troupeau de Vaches & L'Abreuvoir was Jacque's final challenge to both the academic animal painters and the growing impressionist movement.
Born in Paris, Jacque began his training not in printing, but in etching, as an apprentice to a map engraver. Jacque was unsurpassed among his colleagues in the Barbizon Scool. He made his Salon debut in 1833 and regularly contributed painting every year until 1870. winning medals for both ething and painting; he was awarded the Legion D' Honneur in 1867. During the 1840's, heand his friend Millet moved to the village of Barbizon where they felt they could more realistically portray nature. Museum Collections: Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, CA Boston Museum of Fine Art, Boston, MA The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, G.B. Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minneapolis Museum of Quebec, Canada The Louvre, Paris, France Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD.
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