The Crooked Tree at the Carrefour de l'Epine

The Crooked Tree at the Carrefour de l'Epine, from 1852 and in the Mesdag Collection, demonstrates Rousseau's practice of painting individual trees as specific subjects — named, located, revisited across years. The Carrefour de l'Épine (Thorn Crossroads) was a specific location within the Fontainebleau forest that Rousseau knew and painted repeatedly; its gnarled, distinctive trees were for him what specific individuals are to portrait painters. This panel from 1852, approaching the peak of his mature career, captures a crooked tree with the attentive specificity of a biographer: its particular form, the deformations that gave it character, its relationship to the surrounding forest. The Mesdag Collection's holding of this panel is consistent with Dutch collectors' particular appreciation for Rousseau's forest subjects, which recalled the Dutch seventeenth-century tradition of detailed forest painting by Hobbema and Ruisdael while asserting a distinctly French naturalist sensibility.

The panel focuses on the crooked tree as a specific individual form — its deformations, the particular character of its crown and trunk — rather than as a generic tree type. Rousseau's handling renders the bark surface with close attention, and the tree's distinctive angle against the forest setting makes it unmistakably particular.