Does the Bodmer Oak still exist?

Does the Bodmer Oak still exist?

Improbably, two people have asked me in the past month, does the Bodmer Oak still exist?  Karl Bodmer (1809-1893) was a young Swiss artist who journeyed with Prince Maximilian zu Wied-NuWied to America  from 1832-4 and up the Missouri River where he painted the Native Americans. When they returned to Paris, the prince published Bodmer’s pictures as aquatints in his Travels in the Interior of North America (1839-41).  Bodmer stayed on in Paris and was a member of the Barbizon School, who painted landscapes en plein air, often parking himself in the Fountainebleau forest and painting a particular stand of trees.

Later, Impressionist Claude Monet (1840-1926) painted this same tree, in a painting titled The Bodmer Oak (1865), which was  donated by the art dealer-collector Sam Salz to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, where it was seen by me and can be seen by you.

There is a passage in Gustave Flaubert’s (1821-1880) novel Sentimental Education (1869) which describes two characters walking in Fountainebleu Forest and encountering, ”A painter in a blue smock was working at the foot of an oak, with his paintbox on his knees. He looked up and watched them pass” (350) {Penguin Classics 2004]. I’ve always thought this was probably a reference to Bodmer.

Does the Bodmer Oak still exist?  I have no idea how to locate one tree in France, but one botanical blogger writes, alas, “There is no record of a species ever having been recorded for the Bodmer Oak. AND, no reportings of sightings of this particular tree in recent years. . . No-one seems to know if this particular tree is still standing (the Office de Tourisme du Pays de Fontainebleau has sent a query to their forestry department but as yet there is no response) – it may well be long gone. . .“ [Plant Curator, September 23, 2014, http://plantcurator.com/plant-havens-forest-fontainebleau/].

And to give a frivolous answer to an obvious question: I am not descended from the painter, but am related to the tree.