A pioneer of French landscape painting, Rousseau was the leader of a group of painters known as the Barbizon School because of their proximity to the small village of Barbizon, France, outside the picturesque Forest of Fontainebleau. Rousseau worked regularly in the forest from 1836 until 1848 when he moved to the village of Barbizon, where he became friends with several other artists working in the same manner. Rousseau, however, was not always successful and, in the beginning of his career, his radical style barred him from numerous Salon exhibitions. Rousseau’s continual exclusion from the mainstream art world earned him the nickname, “le grand refusé.”
Painted during the last few years of Rousseau’s life, The Great Oaks of Old Bas-Bréau is an ode to the giant aged oaks that dominate the landscape of the Forest of Fontainebleau. With a palette primarily of greens and yellows, Rousseau highlighted the wild branches and gnarled limbs of the trees. Emphasizing their grandeur, he has placed a small hunter, bathed in light, at the edge of the forest. This scene, like many of Rousseau’s images of the forest, was meant to convey a sense of nostalgia for the timeless ways of rural life and the cycles of weather and the seasons.
Rousseau found the style of traditional French landscape painting stifling. He sought to express his passionate feelings for nature by ignoring history and basing his work on his own observations of familiar surroundings. Rousseau asserted that his meticulous depictions of the majestic oaks of Fontainebleau were actually portraits of the trees which were created by listening to their voices.
With Rousseau at the helm, the members of the Barbizon School sought to revolutionize landscape painting by initiating a new approach to the genre that would supersede hundreds of years of Classical French art. According to French tradition, developed by artists such as Claude Lorrain (see the MFAH’s Landscape with a Rock Arch and River), landscape pictures should be carefully composed, contain references to antiquity, and be set in an idealized Italian locale. Rousseau and the followers of the Barbizon School, however, believed sketches and other preparations for landscape paintings should be created outdoors and the final painting completed in the studio. Additionally, they took a communal approach to painting, and artists lived together, painting outdoors by day and discussing their work in the evenings. Soon the Barbizon artists would discover their efforts were not in vain— their approach would culminate in the radical work of the Impressionists later in the century.
As for many artists reacting to the industrialization of cities, the Forest of Fontainebleau held profound meaning for the Barbizon School artists and represented a radical contrast to the speed of modernity. Their interest in nature eventually spread to the city dwellers who, by the 1850s, were seeking an escape in landscape paintings of unspoiled nature.
