NARRATOR—This late landscape by Théodore Rousseau represents a clearing in the Fontainebleau Forest. Rousseau made a handsome living by exploiting the public's growing fascination with the natural environment. But he was also deeply distressed by the negative impact that tourism and the timber industry were having on the Fontainebleau Forest. He may have even conceived of this painting as a kind of reproach to those who threatened to destroy it.

This work was first exhibited in Paris at the Universal Exposition of 1855.Its meticulously detailed but rugged execution is typical of Rousseau's mature style. Seventeenth-century Dutch painting provided a precedent for this vigorous approach to landscape. But many of Rousseau's contemporaries considered his paintings mere sketches that were unworthy of public display.

This debate over finish continued well into the end of the century, culminating with the critical debates over Impressionist technique in the 1870s and 1880s.
Along with Corot, whose works hang in an adjacent gallery of the museum, Rousseau was the chief representative of naturalistic landscape painting in France during the first half of the nineteenth century. He is regarded as the leader of the "Barbizon School"—a loose group of painters of rural life who lived and worked in the tiny villaige of Barbizon in the western edge of the Fontainebleau Forest. You can see other works by Barbizon artists elsewhere in these galleries.