De houthakker (Le bûcheron).

De houthakker (Le bûcheron) — The Woodcutter — from 1863 and now in Museum Gouda, depicts the forest laborer whose work was essential to the Fontainebleau community and whose figure Rousseau, like Millet, approached as a legitimate subject for serious landscape painting. The woodcutter bridges Rousseau's landscape practice and the figure painting more associated with Millet: a human body engaged in physical labor within the forest setting that Rousseau knew most intimately. Museum Gouda's holding of this canvas reflects the strong Dutch interest in Barbizon painting that developed through the mid-nineteenth century — Dutch painters and collectors who visited Barbizon returned with enthusiasm for the school's approach, and the Hague School painters of the 1870s drew directly on this Barbizon inheritance. Rousseau's treatment of the woodcutter integrates the figure into the forest as an element of the landscape's ecological reality rather than isolating him as a genre subject.

The canvas places the woodcutter within a forest setting that surrounds and contextualizes the figure. Rousseau handles the figure with less anatomical precision than Millet, integrating him into the tonal world of the forest through shared shadow and light. The tree being worked provides the composition's main vertical axis.