Antoine Vollon was considered “one of the princes of French art,” and indeed in his own time he enjoyed a stellar reputation. Endowed with an amazing ability to manipulate paint and deliberately avoiding literary or historical themes, he made his name as a painter of still life and humble, interior scenes. In one final category of painting did he achieve lasting distinction. Vollon was a remarkable landscape painter, capable of working in a variety of modes. He could reproduce fugitive light and atmospheric effects and the busy turmoil of a Paris street scene in a manner reminiscent of the Impressionists (his contemporaries), as his Pont-Neuf, Paris, exhibited here, wonderfully attests. On a smaller scale, he could depict woodland scenes with an immediacy and truthfulness worthy of the Barbizon painter Charles-François Daubigny, his mentor and loyal friend. Vollon also loved to render with panache the picturesque corners of ancient towns, as in his Courtyard of 1874, in which the paint application resembles the heavily trowelled texture of the actual stucco walls. Finally, in the larger, more ambitious scenes Vollon intended for public exhibition – such as the Route de Rocquencourt, near Versailles – he could evoke the majesty of nature, enhanced by a relative (one could say modernist) simplicity of design.

Trained in his native Lyon as a printmaker and as a painter largely self-taught, Vollon settled definitively in Paris in 1859. There, in the expansive middle years of the Second Empire, he rose to prominence, becoming a steady, much honored presence at the Paris Salon, beginning in 1864. Though fiercely independent, Antoine Vollon belonged to the Realist camp of painters that included Gustave Courbet, Jean-François Millet, François Bonvin and Théodule Ribot. As a young artist “madly in love with painting” (as he once described himself) and highly prodigious, he soon developed a dazzling technique, handling the oil medium with the aim of faithfully recording the world around him. As the contemporary critic Ernest Chesneau remarked: “The first thing he comes upon, everything that falls within his field of vision is a pretext for painting. His mastery is measured by his astonishing fidelity, by his extreme variety of interpretation, without weakness, without smallness, on the contrary with a firmness, a suppleness, a brio of execution of the least common type.” Whether wielding paint brush or palette knife, or simply smearing oil paint on canvas or panel with his fingers, Vollon was indeed a “painter’s painter.” This characterization is confirmed by the fact that the bravura American Impressionist artist, William Merritt Chase, owned no less than twenty of his paintings, three of which are exhibited here.

Antoine Vollon’s place in the history of French painting has still not been properly assessed. This exhibition – the largest ever devoted to Vollon – underscores how much more there is in fact to learn about this particular moment in the complex continuum that is nineteenth-century art. It is hoped that the sheer quality of the best examples of his large output, displayed here, will foster an appreciation of his paintings and drawings.