Painting's Good Nature, Rooted in a French Forest

We're outside. This is a good moment in the history of art. We're in the forest of Fontainebleau (35 miles south of Paris, eight hours by horse-drawn coach, an hour on the train) and all about us bohemian Parisian painters with easels and beards and mud on their shoes, and experimental photographers with big cameras, are scrutinizing the old trees and the damp underbrush and the way the light falls.

We're in the industrializing 19th century, after Napoleon but before impressionism, which hasn't arrived yet but is coming. The place is stony and wild. A thousand years ago, King Robert the Pious preserved it for the chase. It's good for hunting.

"In the Forest of Fontainebleau: Painters and Photographers From Corot to Monet," a smart 100-picture landscape exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, puts you there.

These sketchers, shooters and painters have chosen their images, but they have, as a band, arrived at a shared notion of what pictures ought to be, and here, for once, vast numbers of their middlebrow fellow citizens come to agree with them. They have arrived at an art consensus -- which is going to spread, like a germ, until it eventually gets into Hudson River School painting, and Cezanne's watercolors, and the cheap prints on the walls of a million motel rooms, and into our minds.

Wind-stirred branches, mossy stones, swift summarizing brush strokes, intimations of returning -- you'll recognize the landscape even if you've never crossed the seas to France.

It may surprise you to find that Kimberly Jones, the National Gallery curator chiefly responsible, has interspersed photographs (by Eugene Cuvelier, John Beasley Greene and the great Gustave Le Gray) with oils (by Theodore Rousseau, Jean-Francois Millet and Narcisse-Virgile Diaz de la Pena), but their mood won't surprise you -- cows mooing in the twilight, sheep returning to the fold, art as deja vu.

This is the forest primeval. It's ancient as the hills. It's lovely, dark and deep, and enfolds sunny spots of greenery. This is more than familiar, it's a cliche. Whose woods these are I think I know. They're ours.

Tourists with cameras who park at the overlook to photograph nature may not know it, but the snapshots they're composing will have Fontainebleau in their DNA.

The pictures in the East Building, even the beautiful ones, may not knock your socks off. They've been dimmed by the vapidity of too many descendants, glazed by the ho-hum.

To retrieve their core of freshness, hit them at an angle, try to view them sideways. Listen to their stories, and focus your attention on what you do not see.

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Here's one of their stories.