The Last of the Buffalo

The Forest of Fontainebleau, painted by Theodore Rousseau in the 1840s-1850s, is a quintessential work of the Barbizon School and a painting that helped establish the forest as a major subject in French landscape art. The painting depicts a dense grove of ancient trees, their gnarled trunks and spreading branches creating a cathedral-like space of dappled shadow and filtered light. Rousseau was the leader of the Barbizon School - the group of painters who settled in the village of Barbizon on the edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau and made the direct observation of nature the foundation of their art. His Forest of Fontainebleau paintings were painted on location over extended periods, an approach that was revolutionary in the 1840s when landscape painting was still dominated by the neoclassical convention of composing idealized views in the studio. The painting's most distinctive quality is its insistence on the specific character of individual trees. Where earlier landscape painters had treated trees as decorative elements, Rousseau painted each trunk, each branch, and each cluster of leaves with the individuality that portraiture traditionally reserved for human subjects. His trees are not types but individuals - ancient, weathered, and dignified, each with its own character and its own history.

Rousseau's Forest of Fontainebleau paintings were instrumental in the campaign to preserve the forest as a nature reserve - one of the first examples of art influencing environmental policy. His vision of the forest as a site of natural grandeur comparable to any mountain or sea influenced the preservation movement and every subsequent painter who took the forest seriously as a subject.

This painting captures Rousseau's deepest conviction: that a forest is not scenery but a community of living beings, each as individual and as significant as any human portrait subject. His ancient trees, rooted in their native soil, are both specific organisms and universal archetypes of endurance and dignity.