PAUL HUET (Paris 1803 - 1869 Paris)

Landscape with Pond and Cows

Oil on paper, laid down on mahogany panel
9 × 11 1/8 inches (22.9 × 28.2 cm)
Signed, lower right: Paul Huet
c. 1825-1835

Provenance:
By descent, family of Paul Huet

Paul Huet is renowned for his paintings, watercolors, prints and lithographs.

He studied in Paris with the neoclassical painter Pierre-Narcisse Guérin (1774-1833), and then intermittently from 1819 to 1822 with Baron Anton-Jean Gros (1771-1835), in whose studio he encountered the English painter Richard Parkes Bonington (1802-1828), with whom he later established a close friendship. Huet supplemented his formal study by painting en plein air—directly from nature—in Saint-Cloud in the early 1820s, and in the forest of Compiègne beginning in 1822, the year in which he befriended Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863), a great supporter of his work.

The exhibition of British landscape paintings at the Salon in 1824, particularly the work of John Constable (1776-1837), greatly inspired the young Huet. Shortly thereafter, Huet and Bonington traveled to Honfleur and Trouville to paint out-of-doors. Huet exhibited at the Salon regularly beginning in 1827. His career began to flourish in the 1830s: in 1831 he illustrated Voyages pittoresques for Taylor and Nodier and in 1837 became the professor of drawing for the Duchesse d’Orléans. In 1841 was made a chevalier of the Légion d’honneur.

Huet’s works are in museum collections throughout the world, including the Musée du Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay, Paris; The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; the Cleveland Museum of Art; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.