The Forest of Fontainebleau

When Gleyre's studio closed in 1864 due to the master's failing eyesight, Claude and his friends were liberated to pursue their own vision more freely. They began making regular expeditions to the Forest of Fontainebleau, a vast woodland southeast of Paris that had become a mecca for landscape painters. Here, in the villages of Barbizon and Chailly-en-Bière, they could work directly from nature while living cheaply in rural inns.

These expeditions to Fontainebleau marked a crucial stage in Monet's development. Working alongside Renoir, Bazille, and Sisley, he pushed beyond the tonal painting of the Barbizon School toward a more radical approach to color and light. Rather than mixing colors on the palette to achieve subtle gradations, he began placing pure colors side by side on the canvas, allowing them to mix optically in the viewer's eye. This technique, which would become a hallmark of Impressionism, enabled him to capture the sparkle and vibration of natural light with unprecedented immediacy.

During one of these forest sojourns in 1865, Claude embarked on his most ambitious project to date: a monumental painting of a picnic scene that would rival Manet's controversial "Déjeuner sur l'herbe" but would be painted entirely outdoors. Using Bazille and his future wife Camille Doncieux as models, he worked on a canvas nearly twenty feet wide. Though the painting was never completed—it survives only in fragments and oil sketches—the project demonstrated Claude's growing confidence and ambition.