Landscape

By the 1850s the forest of Fontainebleau was the most painted wood in France, with landscape painters working out of the village of Barbizon on its edge for some 20 years already. Monticelli met one of them in 1855, Narcisse Díaz de la Peña, who specialised in views of the forest interior, and the two went out on painting trips together. This panel is that sort of picture. Most of its surface is the mass of the trees, brown and olive and worked wet into wet, with a track running along the bottom of the scene and a single gap where the sky comes through, pale and warm, far and away the brightest thing here. The signature sits at the lower right, in the dry paint at the edge of the path.