Voyage to the Landscape of Revolution

Ninteenth Century France was a political powderkeg, a landscape of radical revolutions and imperial power-grabs. Its art was no less volatile, and while we often think of modernism as beginning with the Impressionists late in the century, the seeds for this artistic revolution were sown decades earlier, when a generation of artists left Paris for the Forest of Fontainebleau. In this episode, we visit this forest to find out how it inspired the painters who would upend centuries of landscape painting tradition, the palace that exemplifies everything they were rebelling against, and the town that would give this movement its name.