#forest

Apparently he ran a painters' colony in a little Connecticut town and got tagged as the leader of the 'American Barbizon' crowd — the idea, from what I've read, being that a quiet patch of woods was worth more than any grand mountain view.

They say the French painters who'd worked in these woods half a century earlier were heroes to the Dutch landscape crowd, and apparently he only made the trip himself right at the end of his life — to paint the forest they'd all been admiring from a distance.