The Loing River at the Edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau

The wide, smooth river Loing, a branch of the Seine, wraps around the Forest of Fontainebleau, located fifty miles south of Paris. In this drawing Théodore Rousseau focused on the large expanse of sky that seems to compress the land into a flat, dark band beneath it. Only a few trees and rocky outcrops project upwards, breaking the winding lines of the river and sandy banks.

Rousseau produced the scene outside in the open air, near the village of Barbizon, an area popularized by the group of artists who gathered there in the mid-1800s. They came to draw and paint the region's varied topography, where lush glades of oak and beech give way to semi-deserts of sand, scrub, and pines. Rousseau was particularly fond of the Forest of Fontainebleau, producing many scenes of it for over thirty years. In this drawing, sketched near the end of his life, he concentrated more on the movement of the clouds in the sky than on the details on the land, preferring to reduce individual elements to simple patterns of light and shadow.