Dreams of Nature” surveys the symbolist movement as expressed in landscape painting across Europe from Mallorca to western Russia, and is likely the first exhibition ever to do so. The exhibition, organized by Richard Thomson and Rodolphe Rapetti, contains seventy canvases, with some implausible choices among them depending on where one might draw the line regarding what qualifies as Symbolist.
That turns out to be a complicated consideration. Jean Moréas, writing his Symbolist Manifesto in 1886, described it thus: “Enemy of education, declamation, wrong feelings, objective description, symbolist poetry tries to dress the Idea in a sensitive form which, however, would not be its sole purpose, but furthermore that, while serving to express the Idea in itself, would remain subjective.” The subjectivity was key. Symbolism was above all a defiance of literary naturalism, but there was an equivalent in visual art, the naturalism of the Impressionist landscape, which arguably had started to look a little threadbare by the late 1880s when the term symbolisme came into use.
In some respects, the movement was absurdly reactionary. The Impressionists wanted to capture the real appearance and effect of the landscape, and concentrate on subjects in the observed present. The Symbolists wanted to return to grand, timeless themes, even if they had to resort to pastiches of archaic sculpture in order to get there. Hence Puvis de Chavannes’s toga-ed maidens holding court in the rocky, quasi-Greek seaside, and Alphonse Osbert’s similarly clad women lounging at the dusky, indeterminately European pond