The Morgan Library returns to one of art’s most enduring mysteries: however do you get from Romanticism to realism, Impressionism, and a thoroughly modern future? But you already know: it took a trip “Into the Woods.” A show of that name pays its dues to a gift from Karen B. Cohen, with the usual suspects and some surprising answers. It has not just French drawings but also photographs and, at its center, a novelist, George Sand, through October 22.
I have, I confess, never read a novel by Sand, but she was once more popular than writers I know well, from Stendahl to Balzac, Zola, and Flaubert—and from Romantic illusions to urban realism and formal experiment. She also had an affair with Frédéric Chopin, mingled with such painters as Théodore Rousseau, and sat for a photo by Félix Nadar. 
She tried her hand, too, at watercolor and gouache, and the Morgan has nine examples from around 1875. They are credible at that, with clear colors and easy leaps into distance. She was, in short, interdisciplinary (not to mention gender bending), and so for the Cohen gift was art. It looks to early photography as a clue to drawings.
It starts, though, with drawings and more familiar answers. Artists like Jules Breton and Jean-François Millet idealized peasant labor, and what more could it take to compel them to leave Paris for simpler truths? It taught them the very basis of Romanticism, the dual priority of fact and feelings—and the interconnection between the two. Increasingly, too, they found that interconnection in landscape itself. Théodore Géricault exchanged his epics for a horse-drawn cart and wind-swept trees. Soon those connections brought Camille Corot back to the city and suburbs, for a new visual language.
They valued landscape artists before them, from the great age of Dutch painting. The show has room along with the French for Rembrandt and Jacob van Ruisdael. Yet one can see the difference, in just how much artists infused landscape with feeling. With Rousseau, Rembrandt’s modest cottages become a village in sunset and a shelter nestled in the trees. With Corot, Ruisdael’s sun-dappled trees broaden even as they reach for the sky. van Gogh’s cypresses are on their way—and I have also worked this into my earlier report on van Gogh at the Met as a longer review and my latest upload.
The interconnections also lead to explorations between day and night, culture and nature, objects and light. Moonlight pierces the trees for Paul Huet, much as foamy waters create a center of light for Rousseau. Could, though, photography have changed what they saw? Its long exposures and brushed glass plates enriched many a landscape, much as Corot found a darker, more even texture in moonlit trees. Photography, the Morgan suggests, also enforced a single point of view, even in panoramas. Perspective would never be the same again.
Much early photography is posed and theatrical, and photographers took their cues from painting. For the Morgan, though, it brought a new attention to fact. Peasant labor becomes subordinate to the object of labor, 
much as Karl Bodmer documents charcoal burners. An unknown photographer cuts off the head of a shepherd to focus on his sheep. Albert Lebourg changes the subject entirely, from women in the kitchen to pots gleaming on the wall. Could François Bonvin have seen something like that when he sketched a candlestick looking like heavy equipment?
I have my doubts, but the Morgan has one last answer to why artists went into the woods—because they could. Railroads brought them first to Fontainebleau and then to Barbizon, just in time for Pre-Impressionism. They found the marks of industry there as well, in valve works and aqueducts. Charles-François Daubigny sketched one of the new train stations in Paris, with a majestic steel frame supporting its glass roof. It allowed a thriving middle class its day trips up the Seine, along with Georges Seurat and Claude Monet. That change, though, was still to come.
Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.