Le Pavé de Chailly

What you are looking at

A straight road runs away from us into the forest. On the left it is a pale band of beaten earth; on the right a grass verge strewn with fallen leaves takes up most of the foreground, and a single big trunk stands on it, close enough to fill the right edge of the picture. Beyond it the trees close in on both sides and frame a wedge of whitish sky, and at the far end of the avenue the road disappears into a blue-grey haze where the woods turn.

The season is autumn. Leaves have turned rust and orange on the left, the right-hand trees are still a dry olive green, and the light comes low from the side, laying long violet shadows across the grass from the trunk at right. There are no figures, no carts, no walkers. The whole picture is a lesson in how far a road can go.

The detail most people miss is how carefully the focus changes from front to back. The bark of the near trunk, the individual leaves on the grass and the ruts of the road are picked out sharply; the far trees are a soft, almost undifferentiated screen. Monet builds depth from that change of definition as much as from the converging lines of the road.

The picture also has a definite time of day. The shadows fall across the road rather than along it, so the sun is low and to one side, and the sky at the end of the avenue is white rather than blue, as it is on a hazy autumn afternoon. Monet was already paying attention to exactly the conditions that would later become the titles of his paintings.

Where and when it was painted

The pavé de Chailly was the paved road that led from the village of Chailly-en-Bière, on the western edge of the forest of Fontainebleau, into the woods. The forest had been the open-air studio of the Barbizon painters, Théodore Rousseau, Diaz and Millet among them, for a generation, and in the spring of 1863 Monet went there with his friend Frédéric Bazille after leaving the studio of Charles Gleyre in Paris. He returned in 1864 and again in 1865, when he stayed at Chailly for months to make studies for his huge, unfinished Déjeuner sur l'herbe.

This canvas belongs to that moment, when Monet was 24 or 25 and still learning from Courbet and the Barbizon school. It sits alongside other forest studies of the same months such as The Bodmer Oak, Fontainebleau Forest and the dawn view of Haystacks at Chailly at Sunrise, and it shares its woodland light with the surviving fragments of Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe.

How it was painted

The canvas is small, 43.5 by 59.3 centimeters, the size of a study that could be carried into the forest and finished in a few sessions. The paint is opaque and fairly smooth, closer to Barbizon practice than to the broken touches of the 1870s, but the color is already Monet's own. He sets complementaries against each other to make the light hum: red-brown foliage against green on the right, bluish violet shadows next to the orange of the leaves. The sky is a flat, pale mass that pushes the dark trees forward.

Monet painted the same stretch of road more than once. A larger and differently lit version, Pavé de Chailly in the Fontainebleau Forest, is in the Ordrupgaard museum near Copenhagen. Comparing the two shows how early he was already treating a single motif as something to repeat under different conditions, the habit that would lead to the series of the 1890s.

Ownership and where to see it

The picture passed through a private collection before the painter and collector Étienne Moreau-Nélaton bought it in 1898. In 1906 he gave his collection to the French state, and the painting was assigned to the Musée d'Orsay when it opened in 1986. It is catalogued by Wildenstein as number 56, and was shown in an early retrospective of Monet's work. For the other Monets in the building, see Monet at the Musée d'Orsay; for the arc of his career, Claude Monet's life in paintings and the Claude Monet page.