Narcisse Virgile Diaz De La Pena (French, 1807 to 1876)
Narcisse de la Pena Diaz, a French landscape and figure painter and founding member of the avant-garde Barbizon school, was born in Bordeaux of Spanish parents. Orphaned at the age of 10, he first became a pottery decorator and learned to paint at the Louvre. He first exhibited at the Salon between 1831 and 1837, and from 1837 to 1844, was a core member of the Barbizon school, named for a small village at the edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau. During the ensuing years, he was awarded three Salon gold medals for painting, and, in 1851, was named a Knight of the Legion of Honor. With the Salon of 1848, the Barbizon School of painters became a definite, recognized entity, dominating French landscsape painting through the late 1860′s. Diaz excelled in somber woodland interiors in which spots of light or strips of sky shining through the branches would create dramatic contrasts.
Collections of Diaz de la Pena’s paintings are in The Louvre, The Reims Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and his Valley Marsh is at the Cincinnati Art Museum. There is a significant collection in Paris (32 at the Louvre), in London (four at the National Gallery, four at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and three in the Wallace Collection), and at The Hague (eight at the Mesdag Museum).
Information courtesy of Cowan’s Auctions, 2004