Maison de Rousseau

Historical context

Theodore Rousseau came to Barbizon for the first time in 1833, drawn by the same thing that drew all the painters: the quality of light in the forest, the unpredictability of the sky over the plain, the gnarled oaks of the Bas-Breau that seemed to have been growing since before Paris existed. He returned every year until, in 1847, he settled permanently in the village and made it his home. His was not an easy life here. For twenty years the Paris Salon systematically rejected his paintings -- so consistently that he became known as 'le grand refuse'. The forest work he considered his most honest was precisely what the academic establishment refused to recognise. He lived in relative poverty alongside Millet, the two of them sustaining each other through debts and rejections and the long winters. When Rousseau's wife lost her mind and filled the house with her cries, Millet sat with him. When Millet needed money, Rousseau lent what he had. Recognition came late and hard. By the 1860s Rousseau was decorated, received by Napoleon III, elected to the jury of the Salon he had once been banned from. But by then he was ill -- a paralysis confined him to a wheelchair, and his wife's madness had not lifted. He died in his Barbizon studio in December 1867, aged 55, while the bruyere outside was still in flower. His last wish was to be taken one more time to see the old oaks he had drawn for thirty years: the ones whose portraits, he said, were all in his cartons. The maison-atelier at 55 Grande Rue is now part of the Musee des Peintres de Barbizon, which also occupies the Auberge Ganne at the other end of the street. Rousseau's studio and living quarters have been preserved as a period interior -- a place where the distance between the painted forest and the life that produced it collapses to almost nothing.

Historical research: grappilles.fr — Barbizon Histoire et Patrimoine