If asked to name a tree that inspired nineteenth-century artists, most scholars would cite the Bodmer Oak in the Forest of Fontainebleau. And yet this honor properly belongs to a different tree, Le Rageur (the Raging One), a neighboring tree in the same forest; it served as inspiration for artists and writers throughout the century—and even after its 1904 demise. This article proposes that Le Rageur should be understood as the avatar of the Romantic movement in France. It discusses paintings (by Karl Bodmer, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Narcisse Virgile Diaz de la Peña, Théodore Rousseau) and photographs (by Eugène Cuvelier, Constant-Alexandre Famin, Gustave Le Gray) as well as prints, caricatures, and guidebooks, along with writings by Victor Cherbuliez, Gustave Flaubert, Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, and Théophile Thoré, in order to reinsert Le Rageur into the history of nineteenth-century art, politics, and culture.
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