Can you be both a solitary painter and the leader of a colony of artists? Yes, provided you respect Théodore Rousseau's outdoor retreat. Through the selection of a hundred eminently poetic canvases, the Petit Palais takes us on a stroll in the footsteps of a misanthrope who wandered alone in the woods for hours to sketch the trees directly on the motif . At the time of the Industrial Revolution, this bohemian artist located on the edge of realism and romanticism renounced the academic path, preferring to travel the steep paths of the Auvergne Landscape and the wooded expanses of Franche-Comté.

Studies of trunks, rocks, undergrowth, marshes... This "naturalist constantly drawn towards the ideal", to use Baudelaire's words, lends his voice and his brushes to nature until he obtains the preservation of a part of the Fontainebleau forest recognized under his leadership as an “artistic reserve”. A world first for this “open-air workshop” which over the years has become its world, its refuge.

A true ecologist before his time, Théodore Rousseau unknowingly opened the way to the Impressionists by deliberately blurring the boundaries between painting and drawing and tirelessly adding material to his overloaded green landscapes, in this way instilling the hint of life essential to its forests.