Found in Avignon, this 19th-century painting is a small landscape of a wooded stream in autumn, all gold and brown under the turning trees. The 1800s were when painters left the studio to paint the countryside for its own sake, and in France the Barbizon painters made a quiet wood or a still pond a subject worth a canvas, no grand story required. Small pictures like this brought a piece of that countryside indoors, a window onto a calm afternoon to hang on the wall. Sylvie leans it on a shelf or a mantel where you come on it close, the gilt frame and the soft old colors doing the work.
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