Le Pavé de Chailly

Monet was 24 or 25 when he painted this straight road cutting through the Fontainebleau forest. From 1863 he kept going out to the village of Chailly on the forest's edge, often with his friend the painter Bazille, to work in the open air. These woods were already famous ground. For years the Barbizon painters, Millet and Rousseau among them, had made these trees and clearings their subject, and Monet was measuring himself against them. It was here too that he was working up ideas for an enormous picnic scene he hoped would make his name at the Salon. The road itself, the Pave de Chailly, runs from the foreground into a bright gap in the trees, the whole thing laid down in broad, quick touches of green and grey.