The Valley

In August 1849 the railway from Paris reached Fontainebleau, and the forest there, an hour and a half from the capital instead of seven by coach, filled with day-trippers. A former soldier of Napoleon's army, Claude-François Denecourt, had been painting blue marks on its trees and rocks since the early 1840s to lead walkers along his trails. Painters had worked in that forest for decades, and for some of them the crowds came at the cost of its quiet and its wildness. The museum in Cahors describes this small oil on cardboard as a Fontainebleau landscape by Courbet and dates it only to the second half of the century. No walkers appear in it. The valley is seen from above, over dark trees, and a low sun catches a bare, pale hillside across the way.