Jules Dupré

Jules Dupré made his name with weather. Where other French landscape painters of the 1830s smoothed their skies into calm, he loaded his with storm light and heavy sunset cloud, an appetite for drama he sharpened on a trip to England in 1831, where the painter John Constable was doing something similar with English weather.

He became one of the core figures of the Barbizon school, the group who left the Paris studios to paint the countryside directly from nature. His closest friend among them was Théodore Rousseau, and Dupré liked to tell how Rousseau could never decide when a canvas was finished. He would carry paintings out of the studio to stop his friend from working them to death.

Dupré himself preferred the banks of the Oise river near L'Isle-Adam, north of Paris, to the famous forest at Fontainebleau where the others gathered, and he settled there in 1849. He went on painting his charged skies over quiet water until his death in 1889.