Auberge Ganne — Musée de l'École de Barbizon

François Ganne, a tailor turned grocer, took in painters because they needed rooms and he needed customers. In 1834 he and his wife bought this large house on the Grande Rue to offer full board and lodging. They could not have known that this simple arrangement would make their house one of the founding places of modern French painting.

From the 1830s to the 1860s, some sixty French and foreign artists stayed at the inn, together or in turn. They were doing something that had no institutional name yet: leaving the studio, going into the forest, painting what they saw rather than what the Academy said nature should look like. They ate the Ganne family's food, slept in their rooms, and painted on whatever would take paint: the furniture, the door panels, even the walls. Legend has it that this was how they paid their board; above all, it is the record of a shared life.

After the war of 1870, Edmond Luniot, the Gannes' son-in-law, opened a new hotel in the village and took part of the painted decor with him; other mementoes of the inn were scattered. The building passed through several hands. Bought by the commune in 1987, it was restored, and the works uncovered, beneath old wallpaper, the sketches and studies the painters had left behind. The museum opened in 1995 and came under the Seine-et-Marne Département in 2004. The inn that accidentally became an academy is now the museum that explains what happened here, and why it mattered for everything that came after, Impressionism included.