Forest at Sunset in Winter

By one account, in December 1845 Théodore Rousseau watched the sun go down in Bas-Bréau, a stretch of old woodland in the Forest of Fontainebleau, and set out to recreate it. The canvas he began around 1846 grew to 2.6 metres wide, a tangle of bare winter trees with two stooped peasants at its centre. He worked on it for the rest of his life. His friend Millet and other painters urged him to finish and exhibit it, and it was still unfinished when he died in 1867. It now hangs in the Metropolitan Museum in New York under the title The Forest in Winter at Sunset. This panel in Munich shares that title and is about 41 centimetres wide. The museum dates it only to after 1846, and Rousseau signed it TH. Rousseau at the lower left.