Jean-Michel CELS - Le taureau dans le pré

Jean-Michel CELS The Hague, 1819 – Brussels, 1894 Oil on canvas 30.5 x 37.5 cm (42.5 x 35 cm with frame) Signed and dated lower left "JM Cels / 1843" 19th century frame in wood and gilded stucco In the 1840s, Belgian painter Jean-Michel Cels painted landscapes and studies of natural elements such as trees, trunks and magnificent studies of skies preserved in particular at the National Gallery in London and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He exhibited at the Brussels and Paris Salons (notably in 1850 a "Landscape of Brabant"). Before traveling to Italy in 1847 and exhibiting at the Salon, Cels studied with Pierre-Jean Hellemans, a master of Belgian landscape painting. Our painting dated 1843 is from this period and is marked by the style of its master by its naturalism. But the remarkable rendering of the atmosphere and the sky, as well as a particularly advanced naturalism, particularly in the description of the plants in the foreground, is already the mark of this great master of landscape that Jean-Michel Cels will become and whom we have rediscovered recently thanks to the exhibition organized at the beginning of 2018 at the La Nouvelle Athènes gallery in Paris.