Médaillon Millet & Rousseau

Halfway up the rocky slope at the edge of the forest, a bronze medallion marks the place where two of the greatest painters of the nineteenth century chose to be remembered together. The double portrait was placed here because this was where they worked — not in the studios of Paris, not in the academies, but on this path, in this light, with these trees.

The medallion was inaugurated in 1884 — nine years after Millet died, seventeen years after Rousseau. By then, the same Parisian establishment that had spent decades rejecting Barbizon painting as mud and peasants and trees not worth looking at was erecting bronze monuments in their memory. The forest did not change. The city's opinion of it did.

Both painters are buried side by side in the cemetery of Chailly-en-Bière, a few kilometres away. Rousseau had asked to be buried next to Millet. They had lived within walking distance of each other for the better part of twenty years. This medallion is quieter than a monument. It asks you to look at the forest, not at it.