The Pavé de Chailly in the Forest of Fontainebleau

The Pavé de Chailly in the Forest of Fontainebleau is a large forest landscape Claude Monet painted in 1865, while he was living at the village of Chailly-en-Bière on the edge of the forest. It shows the pavé, the old cobbled road from Chailly into the forest, opening into a sunny clearing under a stormy sky. The picture belongs to Ordrupgaard, the museum of the Danish collector Wilhelm Hansen at Charlottenlund, just north of Copenhagen.

What you are looking at

The foreground is a broad stretch of grass and moss, lit by full sun in yellow-greens and gold and flecked with small touches of ochre and brown, like fallen leaves. A pale strip at left marks the edge of the road where it enters the clearing, and shadows of trees lie across it in cool blue-green bands.

On both sides the forest closes in. At left a wall of dark trees, mostly painted in deep greens and black-greens, slopes down toward the center. At right, close to us, a massive beech trunk rises out of the frame, its smooth gray bark mottled with lichen and painted in long vertical strokes of silver, blue and ochre; its roots grip the grass at its base, and dark foliage spreads above. Between the two masses the sky breaks open in a V of brilliant blue, crowded with dramatic white and gray clouds that look as if they are moving fast. A sunlit bush glows at the end of the opening. The signature is at lower left.

Where and when it was painted

In the spring and summer of 1865 Monet, aged 24, settled at Chailly to work on his most ambitious project yet: a huge picnic scene, Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe, meant to rival Manet and to make his name at the Salon. Frédéric Bazille joined him to pose. The forest that the Barbizon painters Théodore Rousseau and Narcisse Diaz had made famous gave him the setting, and he made many studies of its roads, clearings and trees. The surviving fragments of the big picnic picture are on our pages for Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe and its smaller study The Picnic.

How it was painted

The size of the canvas, nearly a meter by a meter and a third, shows that this was more than a sketch. Monet probably began it on the spot and finished it in the studio. The handling is free and confident: dragged strokes on the beech trunk, rapid scumbles of green on the far trees, and heavy, broken touches of yellow and green in the sunlit grass. The light comes from behind the trees at upper left, so the clearing is lit and the walls of the forest stay dark. That strong contrast of light and shade is still close to Courbet and the Barbizon painters, but the treatment of sunlight on grass, in flat, unblended touches of pure color, is new.

Related paintings

Monet painted the same stretch of the pavé more than once in 1865. A smaller version, Le Pavé de Chailly, is in the Musée d'Orsay, and he made close studies of individual trees such as The Bodmer Oak, now at the Met. On the open plain outside the forest the same year he painted Haystacks at Chailly at Sunrise. The year before, at Honfleur, he had used a similar composition of a road between trees in Walk. For the story of these years, see Monet's life in paintings.

Ownership and where to see it

Ordrupgaard was built as the private house and gallery of Wilhelm Hansen, an insurance magnate who assembled one of the finest collections of French 19th-century painting in Scandinavia during and after the First World War. It opened to the public in 1918, and his widow left it to the Danish state in 1951. The painting hangs with Hansen's other French pictures there. For other collections with early Monets, see where to see Monet's paintings.