Alley in the Forest, Barbizon

Barbizon was already famous ground. For a generation, painters like Millet and Theodore Rousseau had gone to this village on the edge of the Fontainebleau forest to work from nature directly, and it had become a kind of pilgrimage for landscape artists. In 1883 the young Seurat, still in his early twenties, went too, and painted this on the spot on a small wood panel not much bigger than a hand. He builds the shade and the dappled forest floor out of short, dry, criss-crossed strokes. He was only months from the large Bathers at Asnieres and from the dot-by-dot method that would make his name, and you can see him testing how far broken touches of colour can carry a scene. The panel came to the Orsay much later, through a private gift.