Le Chêne Bodmer

Karl Bodmer was a Swiss artist best known for his documentary paintings of Native American peoples, made during an expedition to the American West in 1832-34. He settled in Barbizon in 1849 -- the same year as Millet and Jacque -- and spent the rest of his long life here, dying in 1893. He is the least discussed of the Barbizon painters and perhaps the most interesting: a man who had seen the Mississippi and the Mandan villages and chose, in the end, to spend forty years painting the oaks of Fontainebleau.

The Chene Bodmer -- Bodmer's Oak -- is the tree he painted most often, a massive sessile oak whose circumference was measured at 470 cm in Bodmer's time. It stands in the Bas-Breau sector, a short walk from the village. It is still alive. Several of his paintings of it are in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, where they hang alongside Rousseau's studies of the same tree -- two artists, the same oak, the same light, forty years of looking.