The Banks of the Bouzanne River

The Banks of the Bouzanne River, painted on panel in 1860 and now in the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, depicts a small river in the Berry region of central France — not Fontainebleau but one of several other French landscapes that Rousseau continued to explore even after Barbizon became his permanent home. The Bouzanne is a tributary of the Creuse river system, flowing through a landscape of meadows, willows, and the ancient bocage of rural Berry. Rousseau's interest in river-bank subjects gave him the opportunity to work with the specific qualities of waterside vegetation — willows, reeds, reflected light — that the forest did not offer. The Walters Art Museum acquired the panel as part of its significant holdings of Barbizon school painting, which Henry Walters assembled with particular enthusiasm in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The river bank setting organised the composition around the horizontal water surface, the vegetation of the banks rising above it, and the sky reflected below — three zones in vertical sequence. Rousseau handled the reflections with the care they demanded: the forms of the bank vegetation repeated in the water but loosened and distorted by the current.