L'allée des châtaigniers

1831

Salon debut: a landscape of the Auvergne

The nineteen-year-old Rousseau submitted work to the Paris Salon, and his landscape of the wild Auvergne won recognition for its lively brushwork. At the Salons of 1831, 1833, 1834 and 1835 he showed six works.

1836

The Salon rejects “Landscape of the Jura”

In 1836 the Salon jury rejected Rousseau's great work “Landscape of the Jura” (“The Descent of the Cattle”), and of the eight works he sent to the Salon between 1836 and 1841 none was accepted. By other accounts, the four Salons after his 1831 debut had already gone badly.

winter 1836 – 1837

First winter at Barbizon

Rousseau spent the winter of 1836–1837 at Barbizon with the painters Narcisse Díaz de la Peña and Théodore Caruelle d'Aligny; the nature there impressed him so deeply that from then on he came back every year. In time a circle of painters who, like him, painted nature from life gathered around him — Cabat, Daubigny, Dupré — and so the Barbizon school gradually took shape.

1848

Settles in Barbizon for good

Until then Rousseau had lived at Barbizon only occasionally, but in 1848 he settled in the forest village (with his wife, by some accounts) and spent most of his remaining days in its vicinity. His neighbour, the landscape painter Jules Dupré, recalled how hard Rousseau found it to know when a picture was finished, and how he would sometimes carry off a canvas on which his friend had laboured too long.

1849

Returns to the Salon

In 1849 Rousseau sent work to the Salon again, and all three of his submissions were accepted. He could now obtain fair sums for his pictures, though only about a tenth of their value thirty years after his death, and his admirers grew in number.

1851

Exhibits “The Edge of the Forest”

In 1851, after the reorganization of the Salon of 1848, Rousseau exhibited his masterpiece, “The Edge of the Forest” (now in the Louvre). The authorities still ignored him: that year the Legion of Honour went to Narcisse Diaz, whom Rousseau had taught to paint trees, while he himself received the Cross only soon afterwards.