La quercia di Bodmer, foresta di Fontainebleau

The tree in this picture had a name and was already a minor celebrity. In the forest of Fontainebleau, south of Paris, one great oak was known as the Bodmer Oak, after the Swiss painter Karl Bodmer, who had shown a picture of it at the Paris Salon back in 1850. By the 1860s the forest had become a pilgrimage spot for landscape painters, and the young Monet went there to work. The russet leaves on the ground tell you it is autumn, near the end of a long stay he made in 1865. He was painting these woodland studies while planning a huge picnic scene set among just such trees. That larger canvas gave him endless trouble and he never finished it, but the sketches he brought back from the forest, like this one, he kept.