Interpretive Resource

Frédéric Bazille was an important figure in the formative decade of Impressionism. Born into a prosperous household in Montpellier, he started to paint early in his life but, at his family’s urging, set out to become a doctor. Soon after arriving in Paris in 1862 to pursue his medical studies, he began to frequent the studio of Charles Gleyre, where he met and befriended Claude Monet, Pierre Auguste Renoir, and Alfred Sisley. Bazille committed himself fully to art in 1864, and produced an idiosyncratic body of work that, while closely related to that of his young colleagues, is more blunt in its handling and less overtly innovative in its ambitions. Tragically, just as Bazille was coming into his own artistically, he was killed in the Franco-Prussian War.

Late in 1865, Monet convinced Bazille to join him in the Forest of Fontainebleau to pose for his projected large composition Luncheon on the Grass (Paris; Musée d’Orsay). Executed during this sojourn, Bazille’s Landscape at Chailly pictures a site not far from the village of Barbizon. The overgrown boulders, flecked foliage, and jagged treetops bring to mind the work of Barbizon masters such as Théodore Rousseau or Jules Dupré; other aspects, such as the impenetrable blacks, recollect similar passages in Gustave Courbet’s landscape. But the uninflected azure of the sky and the evocation of brilliant, almost merciless light strike an innovative note, as do the molten strokes on the rocks and the delicate, white linear accents in the tree trunks at the right. Although Landscape at Chailly is an experimental oil study and not a work intended for exhibition, it was precisely while elaborating such ambitious "sketches" in the late 1860s that Bazille, Monet, and Renoir began to question the viability of such a distinction, with results that were to change the course of Western painting.