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| George Sand's Garden at Nohant |
Artist:Eugène Delacroix (French, Charenton-Saint-Maurice 1798–1863 Paris)
Date:ca. 1842–43
Medium:Oil on canvas
Dimensions:17 7/8 x 21 3/4 in. (45.4 x 55.2 cm)
Classification:Paintings
Credit Line:Purchase, Dikran G. Kelekian Gift, 1922
Accession Number:22.27.4
During the 1840s Delacroix made three summer visits to Nohant in central France, where he stayed at the country home of his friend the writer Aurore Dudevant, better known by her pseudonym George Sand. This verdant view on the south side of the house, whose focal point is a simple stone table (or bench), was preceded by a pencil sketch that probably dates to 1842 or 1843 (Musée Carnavalet, Paris). One of Delacroix's rare pure landscapes, it was probably painted as a gift for Sand.
Catalogue Entry
George Sand was the pseudonym of Amantine-Lucile-Aurore Dupin (1804–1876), a foremost figure of the French Romantic movement. She was celebrated not only for her prolific literary output but for donning men’s clothes, smoking in public, and conducting amorous affairs outside her marriage to François Casimir Dudevant (1795–1871), a man one decade her senior whom she had wed in 1822. They had two children before separating in 1835. Sand met Delacroix in November 1834, when she sat for a portrait commissioned by her publisher (private collection; Johnson 1986, no. 223). Delacroix painted a second likeness of her in 1838 (Ordrupgaard, Charlottenlund; Johnson 1986, no. 233); it originally formed part of a double portrait with her lover Frédéric Chopin (1810–1849), which was never completed and eventually cut into two (the latter now Louvre, Paris; Johnson 1986, no. 232). Sand was raised in her grandmother’s house at Nohant in the Berry region of central France. She wrote many novels there and the house served as the setting for a number of them. Its grounds are depicted in the present view—an empty stone table (or bench) serving as the focal point—which takes in a section of the English-style garden on the south side of the house.
Delacroix visited Nohant for the first time in June 1842, and he made two further summer visits before the end of the decade, in July 1843 and August 1846. One of Delacroix’s rare pure landscapes, this painting is closely based on a vigorous pencil drawing made on site that has variously been dated 1842 and 1843 (Musée Carnavalet, Paris, D 4388; on deposit at the Musée de la Vie Romantique, Paris, D 89.230). A related drawing showing a different view is annotated "Nohant 1843" (Musée Carnavalet, D 8344; on deposit at the Musée de la Vie Romantique, D 89.74). The painting has usually been dated by scholars to 1842 or 1843, on the basis of Delacroix’s visits and these drawings, although The Met has traditionally allowed for the possibility that it was painted later in the 1840s. A further watercolor, Trees at Nohant, which is dated 1843, has also been linked to the present work (see Lee Johnson, Delacroix: An Exhibition of Paintings, Drawings, and Lithographs, [London], 1964, p. 59, no. 151, pl. 92, as in the Paul Brame collection, Paris).
Whatever the precise date of the canvas, both the existence of the study and the fact that Delacroix did not care for plein-air painting point to his having executed it in his studio. Its colors must be considered true to their subject—trees, grass, shrubbery—yet the monochromatic, luxuriantly verdant palette is unusual in Delacroix’s oeuvre, evoking the feel of the garden as much as its appearance. Although the painting is based on the drawing, it was also shaped by the twin forces of memory and imagination, which together played a key role in the artist’s creative process. As he wrote to Sand from Paris in late June 1842, following his initial visit to Nohant: "I still see you before my eyes—you and yours; at every hour of the day I follow you: I see you at table, in the garden: I see myself in that dear little study, so cool, so secluded, where from afar I thought about all that overwhelms me here." (published in Correspondance générale d’Eugène Delacroix, ed. André Joubin, Paris, 1936, vol. 2 [1838–49], p. 114; on the subject of Delacroix and his approach to landscape, see George Mras, Eugène Delacroix’s Theory of Art, Princeton, 1966, pp. 56–57, and Vincent Pomarède in Delacroix: The Late Work, Philadelphia, 2001, pp. 117–22).
It is not known when Delacroix gave this painting to George Sand. Included in the auction of her collection in 1864, it was evidently bought in and subsequently came into the possession of her son, Maurice Dudevant, or Sand (1823–1889).
Asher Ethan Miller 2014
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