He was not without champions in the press, and with the title of "le grand refusé" he became known through the writings of his friend Théophile Thoré, the critic who afterwards resided in England and wrote using the name Burger.

[1] During these years of artistic exile Rousseau produced some of his best pictures: The Chestnut Avenue, The Marsh in the Landes (now in the Louvre), Hoar-Frost (now in America); and in 1851, after the reorganization of the Salon in 1848, he exhibited his masterpiece, The Edge of the Forest (also in the Louvre), a picture similar in treatment to, but slightly varied in subject from, the composition called A Glade in the Forest of Fontainebleau, in the Wallace Collection at Hertford House, London.

[1] Until this period Rousseau had lived only occasionally at Barbizon, but in 1848 he took up his residence in the forest village, and spent most of his remaining days in the vicinity.

[1] At the Exposition Universelle of 1853, where all Rousseau's rejected pictures of the previous twenty years were gathered together, his works were acknowledged to form one of the best of the many splendid groups there exhibited.

Moreover, while he was temporarily absent with his ill wife, a youth living in his home (a friend of his family) committed suicide in his Barbizon cottage.

When he visited the Alps in 1863, making sketches of Mont Blanc, he became dangerously ill with inflammation of the lungs; and when he returned to Barbizon he suffered from insomnia and became gradually weakened.

He left many canvases with parts of the picture realized in detail and with the remainder somewhat vague; and also a good number of sketches and water-color drawings.