A village, a forest, and two centuries of looking.

Camille Corot makes his first studies in the Fontainebleau forest. Other landscape painters follow, and the practice of working on the motif, outdoors, takes hold. Barbizon, a simple hamlet at the forest edge, soon becomes their base.

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François Ganne and his wife run a grocery on the Grande Rue that serves drink and food, then takes in lodgers. From the 1820s to the 1860s, painters stay there; they decorate the furniture, the panels and even the bedroom walls. The inn becomes the home of what will be called the Barbizon School.

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A former sergeant of the Empire who became the "Sylvain" of Fontainebleau, Claude-François Denecourt begins in 1842 to lay out trails marked with blue arrows, often described as the first waymarked walking trails in the world. He opens about 150 kilometres of them and publishes guides for walkers. Many of today's routes still follow his paths.

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Rousseau rents a house on the Grande Rue and sets up his studio in the adjoining barn; he will spend the last twenty years of his life there. Refused by the Salon for more than a decade, he is readmitted after the Revolution of 1848, which also brings him a state commission.

Millet leaves Paris in 1849, the year of the cholera epidemic. His house on the Grande Rue remains his studio until his death: there he paints The Sower, The Gleaners and The Angelus.

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After years of campaigning, led notably by Rousseau and the painters, a decree of 13 August 1861 withdraws 1,097 hectares of the Fontainebleau forest from logging on the grounds of their artistic value. It is often described as the first nature reserve in the world. The argument was aesthetic: this landscape deserved protection because painters had taught people how to see it.

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Rousseau dies in Barbizon in December 1867. He is buried in the Chailly-en-Bière cemetery: Barbizon is then only a hamlet of that commune.

Millet dies in January 1875 and is buried beside Rousseau in the Chailly cemetery; Corot dies a few weeks later. The founding generation passes, but interest in Barbizon does not fade: a new kind of cultural tourism takes root.

Until then a hamlet of Chailly-en-Bière, Barbizon becomes a commune in its own right in 1903. The village gains its independence, and soon its own cemetery.

Bought by the commune in 1987, the old inn is restored. The works uncover, on the upper floor beneath old wallpaper and whitewash, the sketches and studies the painters left on the walls. The museum opens in 1995; the Seine-et-Marne Département takes over its management in 2004.

Barbizon is still one long street between open farmland and the forest. What drew the painters here, the light, the sense of a threshold, the closeness of the wild, is largely intact.