The Flood at Saint-Cloud
Paul Huet (1803-1869) · 1855
An avenue of tall trees in the park of Saint-Cloud stands in floodwater that has turned the ground into a lake. In the middle a loaded boat has run aground: one man bails, another stands, a third pushes to free it. To the right a cart with a horse and a cow struggles through the water, its driver hunched, and floating debris, a barrel among it, drifts past. The trees are painted with the broken, agitated touch of a Romantic landscape painter, and the sky, heavy and moving, takes up more than half the canvas.
Paul Huet was the great landscape painter of the Romantic generation and a friend of Delacroix. He painted this large canvas in eighteen fifty five, signing and dating it at the lower left, and sent it to the Exposition Universelle of that year. The state bought it in eighteen fifty seven for the Luxembourg museum, and it arrived at the Louvre in eighteen seventy four. Look at how the men in the boat and the cart are only small accents in a landscape that is really about weather and water; the flood, not the people, is the subject.
Did You Know? Huet chose an avenue of the royal park at Saint-Cloud, just outside Paris, and turned it into a scene of watery chaos worthy of a river in flood.
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