This page was made for you. It tells the story of this painting, the artist who made it, the corner of France it comes from, and how to care for it for the decades ahead.
In a twilight clearing, three figures glow against a sky burning red as if lit by a distant fire. A nymph in a thin veil raises her arm, presiding over the moment like a blessing. In the foreground, a bather turns toward a small winged child who comes to her with cheerful, childlike insistence. This is Eros, Cupid, doing exactly what mythology gave him to do.
The bather does not flinch. She leans toward him, receptive. Love is arriving, and someone is watching over it. Beneath the dark palette, this is an optimistic painting. The light in the trees feels less like a fire than a promise.
Oil on wood panel, 23.8 by 21.7 inches, signed lower left, in its period Napoleon III giltwood frame. Deep browns, woody greens, and sunset carmines give it that velvety, dreamlike quality, the fête galante tradition of amorous garden scenes, updated with the darker mood of 19th-century French Romanticism.
A fête galante is a scene of elegant figures at leisure in a dreamlike landscape, invented by Watteau in the 1700s as a world of music, flirtation, and gentle melancholy. A century later, Romantic painters darkened the mood, trading powdered daylight for glowing dusk and turning the garden into a deep, mythic wood. This panel sits exactly there: an old, tender subject painted in the richer, moodier language of its own century.
The man who painted this had one of the most enviable pedigrees in nineteenth-century French art, and a subject he returned to all his life.
He was born in 1833 in Châtillon-sur-Marne, a hilltop village deep in the Champagne wine country northeast of Paris, its vineyards running down toward the river Marne. The village's great claim to fame is Pope Urban II, the pope who preached the First Crusade in 1095, whom Châtillon honors as a native son with a colossal statue, raised in 1887, that still stands guard over the valley. Rosalbin left it young for Paris, to train at the École des Beaux-Arts in the atelier of Léon Cogniet, one of the most important teachers of the century.
That studio is why this painting carries weight. Cogniet had won the Prix de Rome and painted a ceiling for the Louvre, and across his career he taught more than a hundred artists, among them Rosa Bonheur, Ernest Meissonier, Jean-Paul Laurens, and Léon Bonnat, who shared the atelier with Rosalbin de Buncey. Bonnat would go on to teach John Singer Sargent, Toulouse-Lautrec, Edvard Munch, and Georges Braque. Your painter stands two handshakes from half the names in a nineteenth-century art book.
What he made his own was one particular kind of scene: a dark forest broken open by a glowing clearing, with bathers and figures out of myth, painted in the spirit of Narcisse Díaz de la Peña and the Barbizon painters. This panel is one of its purest examples. He exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1879, and his work is held today in French public museums including Chambéry, Montpellier, Pontoise, Reims, Le Puy-en-Velay, and Sceaux, as well as the museum in Tashkent. He died in Paris in 1891.
This painting was found in Chalencon, a village in the Ardeche region of southern France. It sits at 700 meters altitude on a rocky cone above the deep gorge of the Eyrieux river, with views stretching to the Alps, the Vercors, and the volcanic peaks of the Massif Central. The Celts built a defensive settlement there between the 9th and 4th centuries BC. The Romans followed. By the Middle Ages it had become one of the twelve baronies of the Vivarais.
Its most famous baroness was Diane de Poitiers — the most powerful woman in France for twenty years, royal favorite of King Henri II, and one of the great figures of the French Renaissance. She was celebrated for her beauty, her intelligence, and her influence over the arts at the French court. She owned Chalencon.
The village was a Protestant stronghold during the Wars of Religion. After Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685, Protestantism became illegal and Chalencon's congregation gathered in secret in the countryside to worship, at risk of arrest by the King's dragoons. They built portable pulpits that they hid after each service. The original pulpit, known as the Chaire du desert, is still in the village church.
Still standing in the village: the Porte de Besse, an 11th century gate listed as a historic monument, and the Tour de la Potence, the Gibbet Tower, where executions were carried out. A painting whose central subject is a human skull came from a village that still has its execution tower. That is not a coincidence you could invent.
Chalencon, Ardeche, perched at 700 meters above the Eyrieux gorge, with the artist's city of Montpellier just 80 kilometers to the south.
The village of Chalencon, Ardeche. Image: myhauteloire.fr
Diane de Poitiers, Baroness of Chalencon and favorite of King Henri II of France.
This painting belongs to the France of Napoleon III, the Second Empire, when Paris was being rebuilt into the most glamorous city on earth and its painters were arguing about beauty, myth, and the modern world. Rosalbin worked in the older, dreamier tradition, twilight woods and figures out of mythology, even as a louder, more modern art was being born a few streets away.
This painting has come through well over a century in excellent condition, and it arrives in its period Napoleon III giltwood frame, reinforced on the reverse and ready to hang. One thing to know: it is painted on a wood panel, which behaves a little differently from canvas and wants slightly more care around humidity.
Every painting that leaves Raw Brush goes to someone I will probably never meet. I film a short message for each one, so that at least once, you hear directly from the person who found it.
In this video I share what drew me to this painting, and a genuine thank you for trusting me with your walls.