L'Inondation dans I'lle Seguin

Despite growing up in Paris, Paul Huet was most influenced by the English landscape painters Richard Parkes Bonington and (to a lesser extent) John Constable. Huet met Bonington when he was still in his teens, and in the course of their friendship, their landscape styles converged to the point of being sometimes indistinguishable. Having painted outdoors from an early age, Huet favored the coastal province of Normandy, directly facing England, as a place to travel and sketch. His pictorial concerns—with nature, atmosphere, and effects of light and shade—typify the Romantic approach to landscape, which French and English artists together were so instrumental in shaping. Here, Huet explores the unusual subject of a flood beneath dense trees at his preferred spot of L’Ile Séguin, an island in the Seine southwest of Paris where he had spent vacations as a child.