Clearing in the Forest of Fontainebleau with a Low Wall

Between 1828 and 1835, Camille Corot spent a few days each year at Fontainebleau Forest, rendering its wild primal growth in countless plein-air studies, which he subsequently exhibited at the Paris Salon from 1831 to 1834. The small Bremen study in oil also stems from this period. It is not objective form he conveys here, but instead the overall impression that this seemingly random choice of picture detail made on him. The textbooks of the day on landscape painting advised beginning with the background when sketching, and progressing to the middle ground before creating the link to the foreground. Corot adhered to these rules. He distinctly shaped the dead oak in the background at the right before the radiant blue sky, whereas the other trees are, for the most part, treated as a freely painted, dark green mass of color, albeit suffused with light. He only sketched out the foreground, though he placed effective color accents by concentrating the warm sunlight on the split, withered tree trunk at the left and the weathered wall at the right. In doing so, he simultaneously illustrated the growth and decay of a forest left in its natural state.