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Forest, Eugène (1808-1891)
Eugène Hippolyte Forest lived one of the most curious double lives in nineteenth-century French art, a caricaturist of the July Monarchy who drew on stone alongside Daumier and Grandville, and, thirty years later, a Salon painter of quiet fields, haystacks and birds. Both are the same man, born the same year as Daumier.
| 1808 | 1830 | 1847 | 1882 | 1891 |
| Born at Strasbourgthe same year as Daumier | La Caricaturewith Daumier and Grandville | First Paris Salonlandscapes and birds | Haystacks panelpainted at seventy-four | Dies at Grenobleaged eighty-three |
La Silhouette from 1829 · Le Charivari from 1832 · pupil of Camille Roqueplan
National Gallery of Art, Washington / Musée Carnavalet / Bibliothèque nationale
A listed artist
A pupil of the Romantic painter Camille Roqueplan, he exhibited in regional Salons and, from 1847 to 1866, at the Paris Salon, where he showed landscapes and studies of birds.
He is documented in Bénézit, in the Dictionnaire de biographie française and in the Nouveau dictionnaire de biographie alsacienne. His prints are studied wherever the history of French satire is written.
Born the Same Year as Daumier
He was born in Strasbourg on 24 October 1808, the exact contemporary of Honoré Daumier. He came of age in Paris just as the illustrated satirical press exploded under the July Monarchy, and made his first career on the lithographic stone. He should not be confused with the later Pierre Forest (1881-1971), the Nice-born painter of marines and the Paris skies. The two are unrelated, and works signed simply "Forest" have to be told apart by period and manner.
The Lithographic Stone
Forest absorbed the influence of Henri Monnier and above all of Grandville, whose technique of drawing on the stone he inherited and whose designs he often engraved. Alongside Grandville and Daumier he contributed to the great satirical journals of the age, La Silhouette from 1829 to 1830, the legendary La Caricature from 1830 to 1835, and Le Charivari from 1832, the papers that invented modern political caricature under the constant threat of censorship. He illustrated books too, from Théophile Deyeux's Le Vieux chasseur in 1835 to the Abécédaire illustré published by Aubert in 1838.
The Stone Set Down
Then the satirical career gives way. The man who had spent fifteen years sharpening the world into caricature now recorded it without irony.
He remained active into old age. Our signed panel of haystacks is dated 1882, painted in his mid-seventies, nine years before Monet began the Meules at Giverny, and we place it in its tradition in our guide to Haystacks in French Painting. He died at Grenoble on 28 December 1891, aged eighty-three.
Recognising an Eugène Forest
His painted work is small, direct and plein-air, in a disciplined range of ochre, raw sienna and muted green-grey, the manner of Barbizon, though no source places him among its painters, and the affiliation is one of style rather than of circle. The subjects to look for are fields, haystacks, quiet landscape and studies of birds. Paintings are signed "Eug. Forest", often with the date. His lithographs, far more numerous, carry "E. Forest" or the monogram "Eug. F.", and frequently name Grandville as the inventor of the design he engraved.
Forest belongs to the generation of French landscape painters who worked in and around the Barbizon manner. Two of them are in our directory, Adolphe Félix Cals and Paul Emmanuel Peraire.
Where to See His Work
Eugène Forest is held in major public collections on both sides of the Atlantic, chiefly as a printmaker. His lithographs are in the National Gallery of Art in Washington and in the print department of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and the Musée Carnavalet in Paris holds a caricature made of him by Dantan. His paintings, far rarer, seldom come to the market.
Biographical information compiled from the Bibliothèque nationale de France authority record, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, and published artist reference sources including Bénézit and the Nouveau dictionnaire de biographie alsacienne. Photographs of the painting by GalerieClub Fine Art.
