Chailly guard

Chailly-en-Bière is a village at the edge of the Fontainebleau forest, next door to Barbizon, and in the 1860s it was thick with painters. Nicolae Grigorescu had left Bucharest for Paris in 1861, then followed the pull of Barbizon out to these woods, where he fell in with Millet, Corot, Courbet and Théodore Rousseau, the men remaking French landscape by painting it plainly and out of doors. This is a figure from that world, a local Chailly watchman, painted in 1867, the year Grigorescu also showed seven works at the great Universal Exposition in Paris. The Barbizon habit of looking hard at ordinary country people, without dressing them up, stayed with him, and he carried it back to Romania. This study went into the national collection in Bucharest.