Le Chêne Bodmer

Karl Bodmer, born in Zurich in 1809, is best known for the drawings and watercolours he brought back from an expedition to the American West between 1832 and 1834, travelling with Prince Maximilian of Wied. He settled in Barbizon in 1849 — the same year as Millet — and lived here for nearly forty years; he died in Paris in 1893. He is the least discussed of the Barbizon painters and perhaps the most singular: a man who had seen the Missouri and the Mandan villages, and who chose to spend forty years painting the oaks of Fontainebleau.

One oak in particular recurs so often in his work that it eventually took his name. Bodmer exhibited a painting of it at the Salon of 1850; the motif was then taken up by others, among them Claude Monet, who painted it in 1865 — his canvas is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The tree stood in the Bas-Bréau high forest, a short walk from the village, near a forked beech known as the Caravagio.

The Chêne Bodmer is gone. What remains are the paintings — and the place where it stood.