The Forest in Winter at Sunset

The Forest in Winter at Sunset is a large oil-on-canvas landscape by the French painter Théodore Rousseau, worked on intermittently for some two decades from the mid-1840s until near his death in 1867; it hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (accession 11.4).

Rousseau was the central figure of the Barbizon school. After the Salon jury rejected his Paysage du Jura in 1836, and refused eight further submissions between 1836 and 1841, he stopped exhibiting for years — earning the nickname 'le grand refusé' — and in 1848 settled permanently in Barbizon, the village at the edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau that fills this canvas. His standing was vindicated at the Exposition Universelle of 1855, where his gathered works were judged among the finest on view.

The canvas, 162.6 by 260 cm, shows the forest at dusk in winter: a wall of leafless trees under a low, heavy sky, with two small peasant figures nearly lost among the trunks. Its exceptional size and decades-long gestation reflect a well-documented habit — Rousseau developed his subjects so slowly that his finished canvases are comparatively few. His neighbour Jules Dupré, himself a Barbizon landscape painter, recalled that Rousseau could never tell when a picture was finished, and said he sometimes had to carry a canvas out of the studio to make him stop.

Because the work was reworked over so many years it carries no single date; the Met catalogues it as about 1845-1867. It is among the most ambitious products of the period when the forest itself became a subject of French painting.