France, in the mid-nineteenth century was the birth place for the realist movement. Romanticism and historicism had previously permeated French culture, manifesting in both fine art and literature. The realists rose in opposition. A handful of painters left Paris in order to live and work at the edge of the forest of Fontainebleau. They wished to depict landscapes by way of a physical encounter with nature, to depict the physical world without exotic or divine influences. In pursuit of this ideal, they developed a new genre of landscape painting that displayed the objective experience of nature reached through observation.

The material conditions, the nature that inspired the painters like Jean-François Millet, Théodore Rousseau and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot are now conditioning new works in a most physical sense. Raw pigments from the vegetation collected on site produce random patterns, imprints and colourations on lengths of linen. From yellows to brownish greens and reds. From purples to bluish greys and blacks. From violet to vermilion.