Stroll the French landscape that inspired artists

It was one of those spring days in Paris that makes even the French smile. The trees along the city's 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 color and sparkling light.

An afternoon in the Louvre museum was on my agenda. But the day was too beautiful to be 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 gilded frames on the walls of the Musee d'Orsay.

I can't draw a stick figure and just 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.

It seems obvious to us now but was revolutionary in 1820, when magnificently stultifying paintings with historical and mythological themes, executed in studios, held sway at the Paris Salon and landscape was little more than wallpaper.

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 about 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.

Starving artists

There are fine stone villages all around Fontainebleau forest, but Barbizon will ever 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 the nearby Hotel Siron, a painter could get a hearty dinner, dormitory bed and sack lunch to take into the woods for a paltry sum or, if he couldn't pay, credit was readily extended.

With its stylish restaurants, shops and galleries, Barbizon is now too gentrified for artists, but is still the perfect model of a village in the French countryside. 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 caroused there.

The museum's picture gallery is housed separately 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-story cottage in Barbizon, the art world was beginning to reevaluate his rich, deep landscapes, painted outdoors during countless protracted visits to the same scenes.

Fontainebleau's forest was his favorite subject. On a walk in the woods he once told a friend, "You see all those beautiful trees; I drew them all. ... I have all their portraits."

Rousseau died in 1867 and was buried in the cemetery at the nearby village of Chailly-en-Biere. 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 Siron is now the distinguished L'Hotellerie du Bas-Breau. I stayed one night there in a handsome chamber overlooking the garden, with its massive copper beech tree. 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. The 19th-century mansion has a handsomely decorated restaurant with several floors of guest rooms above.

The next day was just as fair as the one before, perfect for an expedition into the Fontainebleau forest, where royals once cavorted.

Louis IX (1214-70) hunted here with Egyptian hounds and the 18th-century king Francis I once rode in a cavalcade of 10,000 horses.

The artists of the 19th century sauntered into the woods after breakfast wearing broad-brimmed hats and carrying their paints, easels, canvasses, parasols, camp stools and nourishment with them. I went into the woods on a bike rented in the village, with a baguette and a bottle of water. I had a map, but almost every path, ancient oak and oddly shaped boulder was signposted.

With its mounds of smooth limestone boulders — a singular geological feature of Fontainebleau — it always attracted painters who thought it wild and forbidding. But to call the pleasant, rock-strewn valley a gorge seemed a gross overstatement. What the Barbizon painters would have made of Yosemite or the Grand Canyon I could only wonder.

But as the warm noonday sun found me, with doves singing and leaves dancing in the breeze, the forest's gentle magic began to work on me, as it had on the imaginations of 19th-century artists. Perhaps more awesome scenery would have stilled their brushes.