Fontainebleau. Bûcheronnes au pied d'un gros chêne

Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot's 1872 Fontainebleau scene of woodcutters at the foot of a large oak belongs to the forest subjects he explored throughout his career. The women woodcutters — bûcheronnes — were a common subject in French academic and Barbizon painting, combining figure study with landscape in a way that gave social content to what might otherwise be pure landscape. The great oak of Fontainebleau, with its massive, gnarled trunk, was a symbol of the forest's ancient permanence in contrast to human transience. Corot's treatment of such subjects in his late years took on an elegiac quality, the familiar Fontainebleau woodland infused with the atmosphere of a long practiced vision. The Staatsgalerie Stuttgart holds this as a distinguished late Corot.

Corot renders the figures as subordinate accents within the dominant landscape — small, sketchily indicated, absorbed into the atmospheric whole. The oak trunk is given physical presence through heavier paint application. His characteristic grey-green silvery atmosphere envelops the forest interior, diffusing light through the canopy.