Edge of the Woods (Plain of Barbizon near Fontainebleau)

For more than ten years before 1878 this canvas belonged to Gustave Arosa, a Paris businessman, photographer and collector who lived at Saint-Cloud, just west of the city. Arosa is remembered today mostly for a young man in his care. He was the guardian of Paul Gauguin, found him work with a stockbroker in Paris, and owned paintings by Corot, Delacroix and Courbet that Gauguin came to know well.

Rousseau had sent this one to the Paris Salon of 1859, a view at the edge of the woods on the plain near Barbizon, the village where he lived. He finished it in the studio, probably from a sketch made some years before. The museum points to its small surfaces, scrubby bushes and grass under golden leaves, clouds lit by the late afternoon sun, and, in a puddle on the trodden path, the reflection of a peasant gathering wood.

On 25 February 1878 Arosa sold his collection at the Hôtel Drouot, the Paris auction house, and this painting went for 8,900 francs to the dealer Hector Brame. It later reached Boston and belonged to Clara Bertram Kimball, whose bequest brought it to the Museum of Fine Arts in 1923.