"Grez was an idyllic little place," wrote a Swedish artist in 1884, "offering subjects wherever you looked . . . the river with its watermills and little waterfalls, the sun on white walls, old men in clogs, old women in coifs, girls in the sunshine, hens and ducks, grazing cattle, groves, fields and woods."

"The Laurent Boarding House, Grez-sur-Loing" by Elias Erdtman

From 1875 till the mid-1890s the small French village of Grez-sur-Loing drew young artists like a magnet. They came from England, Ireland, Sweden, Norway, Canada, America and even Japan. Writers such as Robert Louis Stevenson and August Strindberg came too, and in the long summer evenings these young Bohemians would play billiards, fall in love and debate their grand passion: art. For many it was a turning point in their lives.

This artist's colony is the subject of an exhibition now at the Fuchu Art Museum. It has taken nearly eight years to organize, and it is well worth a visit to this pleasant new museum in a park.

Grez-sur-Loing is about two hours from Paris by train. Young artists discovered its lovely river in 1875, while visiting the nearby village of Barbizon. Camille Corot had painted its old bridge about 15 years earlier, and his serene painting is an apt opening to the exhibition.

Barbizon painters such as Corot and Millet were heroes to the young rebels. In the 1830s, they had rejected the academic view of landscape and instead found meaning in the actual life of forest and field.

By 1875, Naturalism, Realism and Impressionism were topical subjects. In the age of Zola, paintings of real laborers and peasants were charged with relevance, and scientific discoveries about the eye's response to color and light were sending young Impressionists into the fields. The very ordinariness of Grez was appealing.

At first, the only accommodation was at the Hotel Chevillon, with its gardens that ran down to the river. Here, visitors were happy to paint among the cabbage patches and washerwomen, because they were seeing the world with fresh eyes.

For Frank O'Meara, for example, the misty water meadows breathed of sweet melancholy. His paintings such as "Twilight" show lone people in glimmering landscapes. This Irish artist could see the poetry of passing time in a woman burning leaves, or an old woman closing a gate at dusk.

"On the Bridge at Grez" by Sir John Lavery

O'Meara's friend, Sir John Lavery, painted him on the stone bridge, looking at two villagers. This curious painting shows the distance between the visitors and village life, which flows on like the river below. For many years Lavery kept an idyllic painting of the river in his studio, and when he finally parted with it in 1900, he returned to paint another, the powerful "River at Grez."

It is a dazzling performance. Impressionist paintings are so familiar today, but if we compare this painting to the quiet naturalism of "An Afternoon Chat Under the Cherry Tree" painted 16 years earlier, we can appreciate its original, shocking impact.

The Scandinavian gallery reveals similar transformations. A dejected young history painter in oils, who was to become Sweden's foremost artist, came to Grez in 1882 and wrote, "for the first time I looked at nature. I threw the bizarre on the rubbish heap and my fancy combinations of ideas in the sea. . . . Now I have opened my arms wide to nature, however simple it may be."

Not only had Carl Larsson found a new subject, he had also found a new medium: watercolor. "In the Kitchen Garden" is a marvelous evocation of a bright, hot summer's day. The cabbages in the foreground are delectable pieces of watercolor painting, while the background greenery dissolves into a shimmering haze, and a single spike of pink gladiolus cuts across the foreground, Japonisme rearing its head.

In the American gallery, Willard Metcalf's large canvas of a tired reaper and child, walking home at twilight, echoes the spirituality of Millet and the realism of Jules Bastien-Lepage.

In contrast is a small rough jewel of a painting by Robert Vonnoh, one of America's earliest Impressionists. In "Edge of the Pond" the reeds just before us are ablaze with light. At Grez, Vonnoh experimented in the open air and learned "the value of the first impression."

While most of the other Americans favored tonal gray paintings, in the Barbizon manner, Vonnoh was converted to the pure colors and light of Impressionism. Incidentally, his most famous work, "In Flanders Field," was painted in the lush poppy-filled fields of Grez.

The final, Japanese, section begins with "Reading," a famous painting of a young woman by Seiki Kuroda. Kuroda originally went to France to study law, but there he discovered art, and he had only been studying for about two years when he produced these oils. He was enthusiastic about the village, but his pretty model, Maria Billault, was the main attraction.

Chu Asai was already an art professor when he came to Paris in 1900. At Grez, he admired Larsson's work, brightened his palette and in one four-day trip alone produced 17 delightful watercolor sketches. Later, he returned with the youthful Eisaku Wada, who spent more time wielding a billiard cue than his paintbrush.

Among the Japanese visitors, Asai produced the most paintings of the area. Oils such as "Autumn in Grez" and the warm pastoral scene "Evening in Fontainebleau" beautifully convey the atmosphere of the changing seasons.

On their return to Japan, Kuroda and Asai brought skills they had learned in France to a rising generation of Western-style oil painters. Grez was still attracting foreign artists in the 1920s, but the colony had long since dispersed. Happily, the village is largely unchanged, and the derelict Hotel Chevillon was recently restored by a Swedish art foundation. Once again, easels are sprouting in the gardens of Grez.