Landscape at Chailly

Frédéric Bazille came to Paris from Montpellier to study medicine and stayed to paint, sharing a studio with Claude Monet and standing at the centre of the group of friends — Monet, Renoir, Sisley, Manet — out of which Impressionism would emerge. This canvas was painted at Chailly, by the edge of the forest of Fontainebleau, where he and Monet worked side by side in the summer of 1865; it belongs to the moment when the young painters were abandoning the brown tonality of the studio for open-air painting and for the direct observation of light on foliage and rock. Bazille was killed in the Franco-Prussian War at twenty-eight, and only some sixty of his paintings survive. The painting is held in the Art Institute of Chicago.