Route de Chailly, Fontainebleau

With aesthetic guidebooks and discreetly painted arrows and numbers on the trees and rocks to direct the visitor along its paths, the Forest of Fontainebleau attracted many artists, particularly those of the Barbizon landscape school, as well as vacationing Parisians, in the mid-nineteenth century. Gustave Le Gray, evidently influenced by the Barbizon painters, made many studies of Fontainebleau's foliage; here he focused on a road, representing the human intrusion in the natural landscape. The road cuts a broad swath through the forest, where the lushly dense foliage was abruptly interrupted to accommodate the needs of travelers.