The Spring

This painting is a fine example of Menn's transitional manner when he took his distance with history painting under the influence of Ingres and was attracted by a freer approach of nature developed by Corot and the school of Barbizon. The composition combines a landscape with a pleasant genre scene and is executed in a broader manner, which places the execution of the painting at the end of the 1850s. It shows a mountainous landscape, vaguely reminiscent of the Alps, with two figures, one of them, a man bending over a stream, recalling the classical figure of Narcissus. The interest in rural subject and the rendering of light in plein-air are typical of the Realist movement admired by Menn, which emerged in France in the 1840s.