Into the heart of art

It was one of those spring days in Paris that makes even the French smile. The trees along the Boulevard St Germain were celery green and the air was filled with the smell of bakery goods.

I had just spent three hours with Monet and Renoir in the Musee d'Orsay. When I walked outside, I felt as if I had walked into an Impressionist painting, all bright colour and sparkling light.

Lunch at the Café Voltaire nearby and an afternoon in the Louvre were on my agenda. But the day was too beautiful to waste indoors and I was planning a little art history field trip anyway.

So I picked up a rental car and headed for Barbizon, about 35 miles southeast of Paris. Tucked on the edge of Fontainebleau Forest, the village was visited and beloved by many of the 19th-century artists whose landscapes hang in gilt frames on the walls of the Musee d'Orsay.

On inspiration's trail

I can't even draw a stick figure and wanted to get out into the fine French countryside, where those with actual artistic talent took their easels and palettes.

Paint in tubes, introduced in 1834, and the completion of a railway line to the area in 1849 facilitated excursions by the first generation of Fontainebleau artists to discover that the best way to paint the landscape was to go outdoors.

Jean-Francois Millet, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot and Theodore Rousseau (not to be confused with Henri “Le Douanier'' Rousseau, a post-Impressionist) were the nucleus of an artistic movement that lasted from 1830 to 1860, variously known as the En Plein Air, Barbizon and 1830 School.

In the village of Barbizon, they revived the art of landscape painting, paving the way for the Impressionists who arrived in the forest 30 years later.

I made it out of the city in less than 30 minutes with the windows rolled down and wide-open fields on both sides of the A6 Autoroute. The ride brought to mind an old question: Which is better, nature or art — a field of bright yellow rapeseed or Claude Monet's Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe, partly painted near Barbizon around 1865?

Painters' pantry

There are fine stone villages all around Fontainebleau Forest but Barbizon will always be associated with the school of painters for a simple reason: Along its one narrow Grande Rue were several inns that catered to starving artists.

At the Auberge Ganne, run by Francois Ganne and his formidable wife, Edmee, and then at Hotel Siron, a painter could get a hearty dinner, dormitory bed and sack lunch to take into the woods for a paltry sum and if he couldn't pay, credit was readily extended.

I arrived in time to visit the quaintly restored, blue-shuttered Auberge Ganne, part of a small local museum dedicated to Barbizon School art. The snug artists' dormitory is upstairs and the dining room is on the first floor with cupboards and doors decorated by many of the painters who gathered there.

Corot was an early Auberge Ganne habitue. The son of a prosperous Paris milliner, he began dabbling in the Fontainebleau Forest as a twentysomething art student, although it wasn't until his first trip to Italy in 1825 — a virtual requirement for painters at the time -- that critics began to take note of his strikingly fresh historical landscapes, depicting Salon-approved scenes but infused with colour and light Corot could have captured only by painting in the open air of this forest.

The Barbizon School Museum recently acquired one of Corot's first signed landscapes, dated 1822, depicting the blasted-out trunk of a Fontainebleau tree. It is displayed at the museum's picture gallery near the inn.

Lodestar's retreat

The gallery is housed in the former home of Rousseau, the true lodestar of the Barbizon group, although his work was long excluded from the Salon because critics said it lacked painterly technique.

But by 1847, when he bought his simple two-storey cottage in Barbizon, the art world was beginning to re-evaluate his rich, deep landscapes, executed en plein air during countless, protracted visits to the same scenes.

Rousseau died in 1867 and was buried in the cemetery at the village of Chailly-en-Biere nearby. By that time, a new generation of painters had discovered the Fontainebleau Forest and the Hotel Siron, down the street from the Auberge Ganne, was the Barbizon destination of choice.

The inn's bohemian atmosphere was described by a young Robert Louis Stevenson, who met American artist Fanny Osbourne — who later became his wife — in the Fontainebleau Forest.

His essay Forest Notes tells of the artists who stayed at the Hotel Siron, which is now the distinguished L'Hotellerie du Bas-Breau, named for a cluster of ancient oaks that stood at the east end of the Grande Rue near where it petered out into a cow track.

Reliving the glory days

I stayed one night there in a chamber overlooking the garden, with its massive copper beech tree.

At the end of the day, I walked along the Grande Rue, passing white and purple lilac bushes in full, perfumed bloom. At the west edge of the village, houses yield to farm fields and a marker points out the setting of L'Angelus.

Millet's painting of peasants praying in a potato field at sunset was hardly noticed by art critics when it was completed in the late 1850s but is now a French icon so famous that it appears on tickets to the d'Orsay.

In Barbizon, where the traditional rhythms of country life still prevailed, Millet found subjects aplenty — gleaners, winnowers and other toilers on the land. He settled in 1849 with his wife and nine children in a house on the Grande Rue, a private museum I had toured on a previous visit.

It was crowded with Millet memorabilia, including one of his palettes and a photograph of the village girl thought to have served as a model for the praying peasant in L'Angelus.

The next day I moved to the nearby Auberge des Alouettes, one star poorer than the L'Hotellerie du Bas-Breau, in the official French tourist bureau scheme of things, but cheaper by half. It occupies a capacious mansion built in 1883 by Paris philosopher Gabriel Seailles, whose wife, Jeanne, was a painter.

There is a handsomely decorated restaurant with several floors of guest rooms above.

Rich heritage for cheap

The $45 (Dh165) prix fixe included a foie gras salad, sautéed dorade (a delicate white fish), cheese and a dessert I declined. Instead, I went up to my room and read myself to sleep with Honore de Balzac's Cousin Bette, a tale of revenge and woe set in the Paris of Millet, Corot and Rousseau.

The next day was just as fair as the one before, perfect for an expedition into the great royal forest where saintly Louis IX (1214-70) hunted with Egyptian hounds and Francis I (1708-65) rode in a cavalcade of 10,000 horses.

The artistic tribe of the 19th century sauntered into the woods after breakfast wearing broad-brimmed hats and gaiters, carrying their paints, easels, canvases, parasols, camp stools and nourishment with them.

Picnic lunches from the Auberge Ganne included two hard-boiled eggs, cold meat left over from dinner, a piece of cheese and salt.

I went into the woods on a bike rented in the village, with a sandwich and a bottle of water. With its mounds of smooth limestone boulders — a singular Fontainebleau Forest geological feature — it always attracted painters who thought it wild and forbidding.

An answer arrives

But as the warm noon sun found me, doves sang and the leaves danced on the breeze, the forest's gentle magic began to work on me.

I ruminated on that and then on the old art-versus-nature question, which I resolved. Why choose when both are freely offered by springtime in France?

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