Les Coteaux de Melun

Les Coteaux de Melun (The Hills of Melun), undated and now in the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin, depicts the agricultural hillsides near Melun — a town on the Seine southeast of Paris and close to the Fontainebleau forest area that Rousseau knew intimately. The coteaux — hillsides, often terraced for viticulture or grain — offered a gently undulating landscape of the kind typical of the Ile-de-France, where gentle slopes and wide river valleys alternated with the flat plains of the Barbizon area. Rousseau treated the hillside landscape with the same attentiveness he brought to the forest interior, building his compositions from the specific topography of the sites he studied directly. The undated status of the Dublin canvas places it outside easy chronological assessment, but its subject and handling are consistent with his mature engagement with the landscapes surrounding Fontainebleau.

The hillside composition creates a tiered spatial organisation — foreground, the rising slopes of the coteaux, and sky — that Rousseau articulates through tonal shift and the changing texture of vegetation at different altitudes. The warm agricultural tones of the cultivated slopes contrast with the cooler atmospheric tone of the sky.