On April 29, 2024, AFMO members arrived at @petitpalais_musee for a private tour of the exhibition “Théodore Rousseau. The Voice of the Forest ” with Servane Dargnies-de Vitry, curator of paintings at Musée d’Orsay and co-curator of the exhibition.

Both a romantic and a realist, Rousseau aspired to capture the world’s harmony by
mixing his soul with it. He experimented, adding matter and tirelessly retouching his canvases, going so far as to overload them to bring out the life of the forests. As Baudelaire wrote, he was a “naturalist constantly drawn towards the ideal”. He played a fundamental role in establishing a new French school of landscape painting in the mid-nineteenth century, paving the way for Impressionism.