Barbizon and the Bas-Breau

"Landscapes reflect the people who inhabit them and who manage sometimes to modify them."

Barbizon has retained the image given to it by some of the greatest painters of the Impressionist school.
Ask the centuries-old trees and the rocks sculpted by nature into fantastic forms, about the secrets of this little village in the province of "Bière".

In Charlemagne's day, more than a thousand years ago, Barbizon was a hamlet for peasants and woodcutters; its Latin name was Barbitio and its forest were the abode of wolves. The wolves disappeared soon enough, however, when the forests became part of the Royal Domains.

For centuries, hunts were staged in the forests to be sumptuous displays of French royalty at sport. Chronicles notes that as many as a thousand beats were sighted during the most famous chases.

Having been a playground for the Great, Barbizon achieved international fame in the 19th century as a center for some of the period's most important landscape painters. The Goncourt brothers describe the village thus: "The place is quite dead to the noises of the capital... it enjoys the peace that surrounds great forest, like houses and squares do the shadow of their cathedral". In the 1830's the painters Corot and Théodore Rousseau came to the village. They were followed by many others, including Jean-François Millet at first, and then Charles Jacque, Decamps, Diaz, Paul Huet, Troyon and Ziem. These artists came to stay. Unwittingly, they left their names like a string of white stones to mark the course of Barbizon's history.

For Barbizon had now become a meeting-place for artists, poets and other writers from all over Europe. The guest-list of the Bas-Bréau inn reads like anthology of the period's famous names.

The inn itself was small, in keeping with the size of the village; at that time he carried the name of the proprietor, Monsieur Siron, on its signboard. The guest in most renown was Robert-Louis Stevenson, the author of "Treasure Island" himself. A noteworthy character in his own right, Stevenson scattered anecdotes of Monsieur Siron's inn throughout his novels. He befriended the painters and the refuges from city-life, and spent some of the most pleasant year of his life in this corner of the forest of Fontainebleau. Stevenson's health was poor and he needed the fresh, invigorating air. It is rare to find such a salubrious atmosphere in plains lying so near a large city. The forest of Fontainebleau acts as a kind of filter for the air. Stevenson, in homage perhaps to a Nature so kind, has left us his "Forest Notes".

The Siron's inn served as a shelter for the painter's works becoming in due time an exhibit hall for what had been created in the immediate neighbourhood. Siron rebaptised his inn "Hôtel de l'Exposition" in 1867. One year later Napoleon III and his Empress, returning from an excursion into the forest, stopped at the inn for a day and bought a few paintings, including works by Grigorescu, Chaigneau and Gassies, lumineries of the Barbizon school. The Rumanian Grigorescu is highly regarded today in his own country and is on view in the museums of Bucarest and Cîmpina and even in some cottages of the Rumanian countryside. Akin to those of Grigorescu, yet different nevertheless, the landscapes of Ladislas de Paal Art enjoy popularity in present-day Hungary, where they hang in four large rooms of the Hungarian Museum of Art. De Paal was only one of many painters who trudged back each evening to Siron's inn with palettes hooked over their thumbs. Many surprises lie in wait for the traveller in the museums of London, La Hague, Cairo, Moscow and New-York.

Within the course of a century Barbizon has gone around the world.

Those who go around the world today call a halt at the village of Barbizon.

Things have changed since Millet's day, but the streets, the stones and the forest are still there and they are brething in the same air. The "Hôtel de l'Exposition" became the Hôtellerie du Bas-Bréau in 1937. Mr and Mrs Fava had arrived without pigments or brushes, it is true, but taste, enthusiasm and knowledge of those things which, while no doubt a pleasure for the eye, are especially a delight for the palette. In sixty old years, tradition, elegance, confort and gastronomy have blended in the magic setting of the Bas-Bréau like the touches of the brush in a Impressionist painting.

Jean-Pierre Fava, widely experienced both in France and abroad, has returned to continue and to further perfect the work of his parents; the secret of what the present would achieve lies in the past.