Autumn: The Woodland Pond
A lone figure walks a path through autumn woods, with a pond and dark clouds beyond: Diaz's view of the Forest of Fontainebleau in autumn. Full commentary ↓
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Autumn: The Woodland Pond is an oil painting by Narcisse-Virgile Diaz de la Peña (1867) in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. It measures 50.2 × 66 cm.
In the pictureTrees turned golden stand on either side, and a figure in dark clothes walks toward us along the dirt path in the middle. Gray rocks are scattered along both sides of the path, a pond shows between the trees, and the sky mixes dark storm clouds with bright ones. The sky takes up nearly half the picture.
BackgroundThe Forest of Fontainebleau, south of Paris, was a royal hunting ground, and in the mid-19th century the painters who gathered in the village of Barbizon changed the course of French landscape painting by painting it. Among them, Diaz especially liked to paint the colors of the autumn forest and skies on the verge of a storm. Placing a small figure to make the size of the trees felt was another of his habitual devices.
Puzzle tipAs a puzzle it divides into three layers: the gray and white pieces of the sky at the top, the yellow pieces of the trees in the middle, and the brown and gray pieces of the dirt path and rocks at the bottom. The yellow of the trees differs slightly between left and right, so it helps to check the preview, and the figure on the path is a reference point that anchors the center.
- Artist
- French, Bordeaux 1808–1876 Menton
- Classification
- Paintings
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Dimensions
- 50.2 x 66 cm
- Credit line
- Mr. and Mrs. Isaac D. Fletcher Collection, Bequest of Isaac D. Fletcher, 1917
Source: The Metropolitan Museum of Art ↗
Stories about this work
- How to Print and Cut a Printable Puzzle Cleanly, from Paper to Cutting Order
Print printable puzzles on heavy 120–160g A4 paper at 100% size, in color, single-sided. A guide from choosing paper to print settings and the order of cuts.
- Into the Forest Through Three Fontainebleau Paintings by Diaz
Three paintings of the Fontainebleau forest by the French Barbizon painter Diaz. Tips for solving these brown-and-green forest scenes as puzzles, and how the three differ.
- Two Paintings Where Diaz, Painter of the Fontainebleau Forest, Left the Woods
Even a painter who spent his life painting the Fontainebleau forest on one leg had his exceptions. Diaz seen through a myth outside the forest and a close-up of a single tree.
