Grande Rue

Historical context

The Grande Rue is the only street that matters in Barbizon. It runs for about a kilometre from the Place Marc Jacquet in the west -- where the tourist office and the Auberge Ganne face each other -- to the point where the cobblestones end and the forest begins. Every building of significance is on it or just off it. Every painter who came to Barbizon walked it every day. What is striking now, as it was in the nineteenth century, is the compression. In the space of a few hundred metres you pass the house where Millet painted L'Angelus, the house where Rousseau died, the house where Jacque kept his chickens, the building where the painters drank and argued and decorated the walls in lieu of paying their bills. The street has not changed its proportions. The scale is still domestic, still walkable, still the scale of people who moved on foot and worked by daylight.

Historical research: grappilles.fr — Barbizon Histoire et Patrimoine