Sketch for a forest, made in oil on paper on a sheet of cm. 45.7 x 32; at the bottom left the title and date "Forèt de Fontainbleau 1882".
The author shares the naturalism and poetics of the painters of the Barbizon School, who, taking the forest that separates Barbizon from Fontainebleau as their favorite theme, treated nature and the landscape as the protagonists of the painting without human presence, subverting the hierarchy of genres and pictorial subjects.
A looser rendering and the date (1882) reveal that the painter belongs to the second generation of Barbizon painters, whose values ??he interprets with a more modern language, made up of rapid brushstrokes and the search for light, sensitive to the echo of the nascent Impressionist renewal.
The sheet has regained perfect readability by virtue of an accurate cleaning which deliberately left the fraying visible on the edges and in some points of the sky, after which it was applied to a slightly larger canvas (cm.48 x 34); the work is contained in a beautiful gilded frame of the same era, with a throat and with the corners decorated in pastille.
