Barbizon

Barbizon takes half a day to see: the main street, with the former houses and studios of the painters who founded the Barbizon School there in the mid-19th century -among them Millet, Corot and Rousseau- now turned into galleries and small museums, is essentially the whole village. April-October is best. It's mid-priced by French standards. Its painters popularized outdoor landscape painting as its own genre before Impressionism, laying the groundwork later followed by Monet and his contemporaries, and it remains a village of art galleries tucked against the Fontainebleau forest.