Besharat Gallery & Suites

Long before the hotel, this plot on the Grande Rue already belonged to the painters' story. In the early 1850s the young American William Morris Hunt kept his horses here while he studied with Millet. Back in Boston he would carry the Barbizon School to a whole generation of American collectors and painters. He brought Millet's The Sower home with him, sold it in 1874, and it is now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. His Summer Street studio burned in the Great Boston Fire of 1872, taking many of his own works with it. The Swiss painter Karl Bodmer, famous for his images of the American West, then acquired the property, in 1856. He painted the forest, became one of the figures of the Auberge Ganne, and died in Paris in 1893; he is buried at Chailly-en-Bière, alongside his fellow Barbizon painters.

Around 1876 the house belonged to another Swiss painter, Albert Landerer, who set up his studio upstairs and painted musketeers and battles. He was murdered in his bed here in 1893, a crime that gripped the whole region.

In 1895 the house was sold by order of the court. Théodore Duhamel acquired it and turned it into a hotel, which he named Les Charmettes, after the hamlet in Savoy where Jean-Jacques Rousseau once lived. From 1897 a Swiss, Emile Schaller, ran the business; his son Georges, then Georges' widow Hélène, followed him through both world wars. The village's first public telephone was installed here in 1902; in 1915 the hotel took in convalescent soldiers; in May 1948 Princess Elizabeth lunched here during her visit to Barbizon. Over the years the hotel spread onto neighbouring land, as far as the building across the courtyard, today no. 38 bis.

Today Besharat Gallery & Suites carries on that bond between art and hospitality: a collection of international contemporary art, sculpture gardens and suites to stay in, in the walled gardens where Bodmer and Landerer worked.