Besharat Gallery & Suites

Two men who shaped how America understood French painting passed through this address before the villa existed. William Morris Hunt arrived in the early 1850s, a young American who had seen Millet's The Sower at the 1851 Paris Salon and felt his direction change immediately. He came to Barbizon, kept his horses here, spent two years learning from Millet directly. When he returned to Boston he carried the Barbizon School with him — to Emerson, to Longfellow, to an entire generation of collectors and painters. The canvases he brought back, including five major Millets and The Sower itself, burned in the Great Boston Fire of 1872.

Karl Bodmer arrived after. A Swiss-French painter who had made his name documenting Native American peoples during a two-year expedition across North America in the 1830s, Bodmer had settled in Barbizon by the time he bought this address in 1856. He built the villa he named Les Charmettes — his home and studio for nearly thirty years. He painted the forest, became one of the most animated figures at Auberge Ganne, and helped establish Barbizon as a village where serious art happened daily rather than occasionally. Declining health forced him to sell in 1884 and move to Paris, where he died in 1893. At his request, he was buried in Chailly-en-Bière alongside his fellow Barbizon painters.

The Schaller family acquired the property after Bodmer and developed it as a hotel, running it for many years and establishing the hospitality tradition at this address. Today, Besharat Gallery & Suites continues that unbroken connection between art and welcome — a collection of international contemporary art with rooms to stay in, set in the same walled gardens where Bodmer once worked.