Road in the Woods

In this animated scene of a simple dirt track, the eye is led simultaneously upward to the left and downward to the right. Troyon adopted this dual perspective from seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting, which vanguard French artists of his generation studied for naturalistic alternatives to more formal, Italianate models favored by the state-sponsored Académie des Beaux-Arts. Troyon depicted the penetration of brilliant sunlight through the tree canopy with palpitating brushwork that was rarely equaled in the mid-1840s, when this work was probably painted.