Girl in a Straw Hat, Pierrefonds Forest — Henri Lebasque Postcard

Pierrefonds — a small village in the Oise, north of Paris — sits at the edge of a forest that drew painters out of the city for a clean day's work; Lebasque went there for the kind of dappled, broken light that suits a single figure under trees. The resulting picture has the loose, breath-like brushwork of his outdoor pieces, somewhere between a study and a finished cabinet painting. Sent as a card, it carries the cool of a French summer wood, and pairs neatly with other landscape-and-figure scenes in an art postcard collection.