Spring at Fontainebleau

Antonín Chittussi's 'Spring at Fontainebleau' (1886) is one of his Fontainebleau subjects — the forest at Fontainebleau was the birthplace of French landscape naturalism, the site where Barbizon painters from Corot and Rousseau to Millet had developed the plein air approach that transformed European landscape painting. Chittussi's engagement with this historically charged landscape placed him in direct dialogue with the tradition he had absorbed through his French training, and his spring subject at Fontainebleau was both homage and independent investigation.

Chittussi renders the Fontainebleau spring with the atmospheric sensitivity and tonal control that his Barbizon training had given him — the specific quality of early spring light in the forest (the bare branches beginning to show new growth, the first green pushing through the leaf litter, the particular clarity of the season's light before summer foliage reduces it) depicted with direct naturalist observation. His engagement with the historical Barbizon landscape carried his own Czech sensibility to the French tradition.