View of the Forest of Fontainebleau
Gustave Courbet·1855
Historical Context
Painted in 1855, Courbet's view of the Fontainebleau forest now hangs in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. The Forest of Fontainebleau had been a gathering place for French landscape painters since the Barbizon School coalesced there in the 1830s and 1840s, with Théodore Rousseau, Millet, and Corot all working in its glades. Courbet arrived in this tradition with characteristic combativeness, treating forest landscapes with the same unflinching materialism he applied to human subjects — moss was painted as moss, bark as bark, mud as mud, without the Barbizon elevation into poetic mood. The year 1855 was pivotal for Courbet: he famously mounted his own Pavilion du Réalisme outside the Exposition Universelle after being rejected by its jury, an act of artistic self-assertion that defined his position as the embodiment of Realism.
Technical Analysis
The palette knife work evident in Courbet's forest paintings achieves the textural density of tree bark, forest floor debris, and mossy rock with a directness impossible using only brushwork. Deep greens and blacks describe the forest interior's characteristic gloom. Filtered light through the canopy is suggested by localized bright passages against the dominant dark tonalities.
Look Closer
- ◆Palette knife passages in the bark and ground create actual surface relief on the canvas — the paint literally rises and falls
- ◆The forest floor's jumble of fallen leaves, roots, and debris is handled with the same visual weight as any human subject in Courbet's work
- ◆Filtered light penetrating the canopy creates bright, isolated patches that give spatial depth to the otherwise dense interior
- ◆Deep greens mixed with near-black create the specific lightless density of an old-growth forest interior on a cloudy day
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