Fontainebleau: Oak Trees at Bas-Bréau - Camille Corot (1832 or 1833)

Camille Pissarro

Oil on paper, laid down on wood

Metropolitan Museum of Art

This intimate oil study depicts a dense stand of ancient oak trees in Bas-Bréau, a section of the Forest of Fontainebleau renowned for its monumental trees. The work is executed in the direct, naturalistic plein air style that Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot had developed during his Italian campaigns, characterized by confident, visible brushwork and a subtle recession of tonal values from a richly saturated foreground into a spare, luminous sky. The painting is universally documented by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and major art historical sources as a work by Corot (1796–1875), not Camille Pissarro; the Pissarro attribution appearing in some digital repositories is an error of misattribution. As a Barbizon-era outdoor study, the work stands as a landmark in the history of French landscape painting, linking the classical tradition to the Impressionism that would follow.