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Chailly en Biere

            Driving from Germany, the first destination of the great Impressionism Trail was Chailly en Biere. Staying at a beautiful villa at the edge of the village, we were provided with the most delectable breakfasts and facts about the area from our gracious host. The wall at the edge this property is even featured in Millet’s painting L’Angelus (which we’d soon see in Paris) in the far distance in the painting's horizon line.

Chailly en Biere is a small village close to Barbizon, where several painters, including Monet and his friend Bazille lodged during their getaways from Paris after the railway system provided an easier transport from the city. The Lion d’Or was an inn frequented by Monet and the location where Monet painted Luncheon on the Grass. Bazille painted the Improvised Ambulance there, which is a painting of Monet recovering after a 'sporting accident'. The accident was an incident where he shielded children from a fly away discus while painting plein air! Monet was also known to skip out on the lodging bill and float between Lion d'Or and Cheval Blanc for his visits in Chailly.

            Lion d’Or currently houses a restaurant on the ground floor, with a few rooms for rent upstairs. Abuzz with the excitement of walking in Giant footsteps, we ate dinner here our first night!

   Just around the corner was the site of another artist’s painting of a Chailly streetview. Jean-Baptiste George Gassies moved to Chailly en Biere in 1876 and portrayed the village in many paintings, even recording an account of the era of painters in Barbizon. I chose this site for my painting in the village.

Just across the street, past the main intersection, is the Cheval Blanc - another inn, frequented by Rousseau, Sisley, Diaz, Renoir, Monet, Bazille and Rosa Bonheur. Numerous artists have left their marks on the dining room walls. Today it houses the village tabac/bar, which is central to a french village, and we were able to take a look around at those paintings!

Barbizon

            Barbizon is a neighboring village of Chailly. By the time Monet and Bazille were staying in Chailly, it was was already frequented by by Millet, Gassies, Rousseau and others. The Barbizon 'School' loosely formed between 1830-1850 and was a society of painters that gathered in the Fountainebleau forests outside of Paris seeking refuge by painting nature from life. Our stay in Chailly en Biere was a 5-minute drive from this old artist’s refuge. Millet and Rousseau’s home/studios, as well as the Museum of the Barbizon School are located here. The museum is now contained in the historic hotel/boarding house, the old Ganne Inn, which hosted these painters, who again, left their paintings directly on the wall. I especially enjoyed works by Corot & Diaz.

The museum explained some interesting history on Landscape and Plein Air Painting:

            “Since the 17^th Century, painting in France was ordered into a hierarchy of genres. This was one of the fundamental principles taught at the Academie des Beaux-Arts. Representing the human figure was more important than depicting nature. Moreover, artists who portrayed scenes requiring the most imagination were more esteemed than those depicting inanimate objects or copying from nature. Five genres were identified. The most acclaimed was the “Grand genre” or history painting: biblical, mythological or battle scenes. Next came portraits, genre scenes, landscapes and still lifes.

Landscape paintings existed long before the 19^th Century, but they were generally composed, imagined, arranged and even idealized to suit the scene for which they served as a backdrop. Such landscapes are therefore neither standalone (painted for their own sake) nor realistic. A human figure is almost always present.

It was not until 1816 that the Academie des Beaux-Arts instituted the Grand Prix for Historical Landscape Painting.

The painters who stayed at Barbizon did not invent plein-air painting. Studies drawn in the open air had been commonplace since the Renaissance. In 1799, Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes declared it to be one of the cornerstones of his advice to students. He described the need to venture into the forests and villages around Paris to consult-nature and select motifs that would be taken up in the studio and used in a final work.

A revival took place in Barbizon in the first half of the 19^th Century. Through direct observation of nature, artists sought to break away from the masters of the past. Rather than imitating their works, they copied nature at its source, as it really was, and turned the forest into a life size studio. They questioned the hierarchy of pictorial genres and devoted themselves solely to depicting landscapes, with no other subject as a pretext.

The hundreds of painters and photographers who flocked to Barbizon from different countries in the mid-19^th Century were also looking for and contributing to a constructed landscape. Although the early Barbizon painters did not adopt a unified style, they did share common aesthetic sources. The influence of the Italian school had been superseded by that of 17^th Century landscape painters from Holland (Ruisdael & Hobbema) and France (Lorrain) and later in Britain (Constable).”

Millet's Studio

  The day of our first visit to Barbizon, the light hit Millet’s studio just right, and became the subject for one of my paintings there. His studio was open, which demanded a visit! There, I was able to see several inspiring works including drawings and portraits. 

    Nearby in the Fountainebleau forest, there are several rock formations that were appealing to the painters and feature in several works. I was able to stand in Corot’s footprints for a plein air session while husband biked the forest trails.

I was also able to squeeze in painting fields in bloom outside of Barbizon as well as a view of Chailly from the distance.

We enjoyed dinner in Barbizon one evening, the village glows, bathed in a warm light which contrasts beautifully against the blue sky at dusk!

After leaving our charming villa, our next stop would be Paris and Bougival. Musée d'Orsay, the Louvre, l'Orangerie, Musée Marmatton and Berthe Morisot's home!