Forest, Eugene (1808–1891)

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Related biographies: Cals, Adolphe Felix (1810–1880) · Peraire, Paul Emmanuel (1829–1893) · Forest, Pierre (1881–1971)

Browse the collection: French artists · Landscape paintings · 19th-century paintings

Biography

Two careers in one life

Eugene Hippolyte Forest lived one of the most curious double lives in nineteenth-century French art. To historians of the press, he is a caricaturist of the July Monarchy, a collaborator of Daumier and Grandville in the golden age of French satire. To collectors of landscape painting, he is a Benezit-listed Barbizon painter of quiet fields, birds and haystacks. Both are the same man.

He was born in Strasbourg on 24 October 1808, the exact contemporary of Daumier, born that same year. 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" require the eye to tell them apart by period and manner.

With Daumier and Grandville

As a lithographer and caricaturist, Forest absorbed the influence of Henri Monnier and above all of Grandville, whose technique of drawing on the stone he inherited and with whom he became a habitual collaborator, often engraving Grandville's designs. Alongside Grandville and Honore Daumier, he contributed to the great satirical journals of the age: La Silhouette (1829-1830), the legendary La Caricature (1830-1835), and Le Charivari from 1832, the papers that invented modern political caricature under the constant threat of censorship. He also illustrated books, from Theophile Deyeux's Le Vieux chasseur in 1835 to the Abecedaire illustre published by Aubert in 1838. The Bibliotheque nationale de France holds an extensive collection of his prints.

Eugene Forest, Haystacks Landscape, signed and dated 1882, oil on wood panel. GalerieClub Fine Art.

The painter of landscapes and birds

Forest's second career unfolded with the brush. 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. His painted work belongs to the Barbizon current: small, direct, plein-air panels in the disciplined range of ochre, raw sienna and muted green-grey, the manner of a man who had spent decades observing the world closely enough to caricature it, and who 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 series at Giverny; we place it in its tradition in our guide to Haystacks in French Painting. Forest died in Grenoble on 28 December 1891, aged 83.

Legacy

Forest is documented in the Benezit dictionary, the Bibliotheque nationale de France, and the Dictionnaire de biographie alsacienne. His prints for La Caricature and Le Charivari are studied wherever the history of French satire is written; his paintings, far rarer on the market, offer collectors something unusual: a genuine Barbizon panel by a man who stood at the birth of modern caricature alongside Daumier. Every work offered by GalerieClub Fine Art ships free to the United States and Canada.

Timeline

1808 Born 24 October in Strasbourg, the same year as Daumier.

1829–1830 Contributes to La Silhouette, the first great illustrated satirical journal of Paris.

1830–1835 Works for La Caricature alongside Daumier and Grandville, whose designs he often engraves.

1832 Begins contributing to Le Charivari.

1835–1842 Illustrates books including Le Vieux chasseur (1835) and the Abecedaire illustre (1838).

1847 Begins exhibiting landscapes and bird studies at the Paris Salon, as a pupil of Camille Roqueplan. Shows there until 1866.

1882 Paints the signed and dated Haystacks Landscape now in our collection, nine years before Monet's Meules.

1891 Dies 28 December in Grenoble, aged 83.

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