Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot - Forest of Fontainebleau - Google Art Project

The Pond at Gylieu by Charles-Francois Daubigny, 1853

The Barbizon school of painters were part of an

art movement An art movement is a tendency or style in art with a specific common philosophy or goal, followed by a group of artists during a specific period of time, (usually a few months, years or decades) or, at least, with the heyday of the movement defi ...

towards Realism in art, which arose in the context of the dominant

Romantic Movement Romanticism (also known as the Romantic movement or Romantic era) was an artistic, literary, musical, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe towards the end of the 18th century, and in most areas was at its peak in the approximate ...

of the time. The Barbizon school was active roughly from 1830 through 1870. It takes its name from the village of

Barbizon Barbizon () is a commune (town) in the Seine-et-Marne department in north-central France. It is located near the Fontainebleau Forest. Demographics The inhabitants are called ''Barbizonais''. Art history The Barbizon school of painters is nam ...

France France (), officially the French Republic ( ), is a country primarily located in Western Europe. It also comprises of overseas regions and territories in the Americas and the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans. Its metropolitan area ...

, on the edge of the

Forest of Fontainebleau The forest of Fontainebleau (french: Forêt de Fontainebleau, or ''Forêt de Bière'', meaning "forest of heather") is a mixed deciduous forest lying southeast of Paris, France. It is located primarily in the arrondissement of Fontainebleau ...

, where many of the artists gathered. Most of their works were

landscape painting Landscape painting, also known as landscape art, is the depiction of natural scenery such as mountains, valleys, trees, rivers, and forests, especially where the main subject is a wide view—with its elements arranged into a coherent compo ...

, but several of them also painted landscapes with farmworkers, and genre scenes of village life. Some of the most prominent features of this school are its tonal qualities, color, loose brushwork, and softness of form. The leaders of the Barbizon school were:

Théodore Rousseau Étienne Pierre Théodore Rousseau (April 15, 1812December 22, 1867) was a French painter of the Barbizon school. Life Youth He was born in Paris, France in a bourgeois family. At first he received a basic level of training, but soon display ...

Charles-François Daubigny Charles-François Daubigny ( , , ; 15 February 181719 February 1878) was a French painter, one of the members of the Barbizon school, and is considered an important precursor of impressionism. He was also a prolific printmaker, mostly in etchin ...

, Jules Dupré,

Constant Troyon Constant Troyon (August 28, 1810 – February 21, 1865) was a French painter of the Barbizon school. In the early part of his career he painted mostly landscapes. It was only comparatively late in life that Troyon found his ''métier'' as a pa ...

Charles Jacque Charles-Émile Jacque (23 May 1813 – 7 May 1894) was a French painter of Pastoralism and engraver who was, with Jean-François Millet, part of the Barbizon School. He first learned to engrave maps when he spent seven years in the French Army. ...

, and Narcisse Virgilio Díaz.

Jean-François Millet Jean-François Millet (; 4 October 1814 – 20 January 1875) was a French artist and one of the founders of the Barbizon school in rural France. Millet is noted for his paintings of peasant farmers and can be categorized as part of the Realism ...

lived in Barbizon from 1849, but his interest in figures with a landscape backdrop sets him rather apart from the others. Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot was the earliest on the scene, first painting in the forest in 1829, but British art historian Harold Osborne suggested that "his work has a poetic and literary quality which sets him somewhat apart". Other artists associated with the school, often pupils of the main group, include:

Henri Harpignies Henri-Joseph Harpignies (; June 28, 1819 – August 28, 1916) was a French landscape painter of the Barbizon school. Life He was born at Valenciennes. His parents intended for him to pursue a business career, but his determination to become a ...

, Albert Charpin, François-Louis Français, and Émile van Marcke. Many of the artists were also printmakers, mostly in

etching Etching is traditionally the process of using strong acid or mordant to cut into the unprotected parts of a metal surface to create a design in intaglio (incised) in the metal. In modern manufacturing, other chemicals may be used on other types ...

but the group also provided the bulk of the artists using the semiphotographic

cliché verre Cliché verre, also known as the glass print technique, is a type of "semiphotographic" printmaking. An image is created by various means on a transparent surface, such as glass, thin paper or film, and then placed on light sensitive paper in a ...

technique. The French

etching revival The etching revival was the re-emergence and invigoration of etching as an original form of printmaking during the period approximately from 1850 to 1930. The main centres were France, Britain and the United States, but other countries, such as ...

began with the school, in the 1850s.

History

In 1824 the

Salon de Paris The Salon (french: Salon), or rarely Paris Salon (French: ''Salon de Paris'' ), beginning in 1667 was the official art exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Between 1748 and 1890 it was arguably the greatest annual or biennial art ...

exhibited works of John Constable, an English painter. His rural scenes influenced some of the younger artists of the time, moving them to abandon formalism and to draw inspiration directly from nature. Natural scenes became the subjects of their paintings rather than mere backdrops to dramatic events. During the

Revolutions of 1848 The Revolutions of 1848, known in some countries as the Springtime of the Peoples or the Springtime of Nations, were a series of political upheavals throughout Europe starting in 1848. It remains the most widespread revolutionary wave in Europea ...

artists gathered at Barbizon to follow Constable's ideas, making nature the subject of their paintings. The French landscape became a major theme of the Barbizon painters. In the spring of 1829, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot came to Barbizon to paint in the

. He had first painted in the forest at Chailly in 1822. He returned to Barbizon in the autumn of 1830 and in the summer of 1831, where he made drawings and oil studies, from which he made a painting intended for the Salon of 1830; "View of the Forest of Fontainebleau'" (now in the National Gallery in Washington) and, for the salon of 1831, another "View of the Forest of Fontainebleau"'. While there he met the members of the Barbizon school:

Paul Huet Paul Huet (3 October 1803 – 8 January 1869) was a French painter and printmaker born in Paris. He studied under Gros and Guerin. He met the English painter Richard Parkes Bonington in the studio of Gros, where he studied irregularly from 1819 ...

, and the young

. Millet extended the idea from landscape to figures — peasant figures, scenes of peasant life, and work in the fields. In ''

The Gleaners ''The Gleaners'' (''Des glaneuses'') is an oil painting by Jean-François Millet completed in 1857. It depicts three peasant women gleaning a field of stray stalks of wheat after the harvest. The painting is famous for featuring in a sympathet ...

'' (1857), for example, Millet portrays three peasant women working at the harvest. Gleaners are poor people who are permitted to gather the remains after the owners of the field complete the main harvest. The owners (portrayed as wealthy) and their laborers are seen in the back of the painting. Millet shifted the focus and the subject matter from the rich and prominent to those at the bottom of the social ladders. During the late 1860s, the Barbizon painters attracted the attention of a younger generation of French artists studying in Paris. Several of those artists visited Fontainebleau Forest to paint the landscape, including

Claude Monet Oscar-Claude Monet (, , ; 14 November 1840 – 5 December 1926) was a French painter and founder of impressionist painting who is seen as a key precursor to modernism, especially in his attempts to paint nature as he perceived it. Durin ...

, Pierre-Auguste Renoir,

Alfred Sisley Alfred Sisley (; ; 30 October 1839 – 29 January 1899) was an Impressionist landscape painter who was born and spent most of his life in France, but retained British citizenship. He was the most consistent of the Impressionists in his dedicatio ...

and Frédéric Bazille. In the 1870s those artists, among others, developed the

called

Impressionism Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement characterized by relatively small, thin, yet visible brush strokes, open composition, emphasis on accurate depiction of light in its changing qualities (often accentuating the effects of the passage ...

and practiced '' plein air'' painting. In contrast, the main members of the school made drawings and sketches on the spot, but painted back in their studios. The Post-Impressionist painter

Vincent van Gogh Vincent Willem van Gogh (; 30 March 185329 July 1890) was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter who posthumously became one of the most famous and influential figures in Western art history. In a decade, he created about 2,100 artworks, inc ...

studied and copied several of the Barbizon painters as well, including 21 copies of paintings by Millet. He copied Millet more than any other artist. He also did three paintings in Daubigny's Garden. Both Théodore Rousseau (1867) and Jean-François Millet (1875) died at Barbizon.

Influence in Europe

Painters in other countries were also influenced by this art. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, many artists came to Paris from

Austria-Hungary Austria-Hungary, often referred to as the Austro-Hungarian Empire,, the Dual Monarchy, or Austria, was a constitutional monarchy and great power in Central Europe between 1867 and 1918. It was formed with the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of ...

to study the new movements. For instance, the Hungarian painter János Thorma studied in Paris as a young man. In 1896 he was one of the founders of the Nagybánya artists' colony in what is now

Baia Mare Baia Mare ( , ; hu, Nagybánya; german: Frauenbach or Groß-Neustadt; la, Rivulus Dominarum) is a municipality along the Săsar River, in northwestern Romania; it is the capital of Maramureș County. The city lies in the region of Maramur ...

Romania Romania ( ; ro, România ) is a country located at the crossroads of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe. It borders Bulgaria to the south, Ukraine to the north, Hungary to the west, Serbia to the southwest, Moldova to the east, and ...

, which brought impressionism to Hungary. In 2013 the

Hungarian National Gallery The Hungarian National Gallery (also known as Magyar Nemzeti Galéria), was established in 1957 as the national art museum. It is located in Buda Castle in Budapest, Hungary. Its collections cover Hungarian art in all genres, including the works ...

opens a major retrospective of his work, entitled, 'János Thorma, the Painter of the Hungarian Barbizon'', 8 February – 19 May 2013, Hungarian National Gallery''János Thorma, the Painter of the Hungarian Barbizon''
8 February – 19 May 2013, Hungarian National Gallery

Karl Bodmer Johann Carl Bodmer (11 February 1809 – 30 October 1893) was a Swiss-French printmaker, etcher, lithographer, zinc engraver, draughtsman, painter, illustrator and hunter. Known as Karl Bodmer in literature and paintings, as a Swiss and French c ...

, originally Swiss, settled in Barbizon in 1849. László Paál, another Hungarian, lived in Barbizon in the 1870s.

Influence in America

The Barbizon painters also had a profound impact on landscape painting in the United States. This included the development of the American Barbizon school by

William Morris Hunt William Morris Hunt (March 31, 1824September 8, 1879) was an American painter. Born into the political Hunt family of Vermont, he trained in Paris with the realist Jean-François Millet and studied under him at the Barbizon artists’ colony, be ...

. Several artists who were also in, or contemporary to, the

Hudson River School The Hudson River School was a mid-19th century American art movement embodied by a group of landscape painters whose aesthetic vision was influenced by Romanticism. The paintings typically depict the Hudson River Valley and the surrounding area ...

studied Barbizon paintings for their loose brushwork and emotional impact. A notable example is

George Inness George Inness (May 1, 1825 – August 3, 1894) was a prominent American landscape painter. Now recognized as one of the most influential American artists of the nineteenth century, Inness was influenced by the Hudson River School at the s ...

, who sought to emulate the works of Rousseau. Paintings from the Barbizon school also influenced landscape painting in California. The artist Percy Gray carefully studied works by Rousseau and other painters which he saw in traveling exhibitions to inform his own paintings of California hills and coastline. The influence of the Barbizon painters may be seen in the sporting dog paintings of Percival Rosseau (1859-1937), who grew up in Louisiana and studied at the Academie Julien.

Gallery

File:Forest_of_Fontainebleau-1830-Jean-Baptiste-Camille_Corot.jpg , Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, ''View of the Forest of Fontainebleau'' (1830) File:The Old Oak by Jules Dupré, c1870.jpg, Jules Dupré, ''The Old Oak,'' c. 1870, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. File:Constant Troyon - The Bathers (Clearing in the Forest) - Google Art Project.jpg,

, ''The Bathers (Clearing in the Forest)'', 1842 File:Shepherdess and Her Flock by Charles-Émile Jacque, 1878.jpg, Charles-Émile Jacque, ''Shepherdess and Her Flock'', 1878

Related artists

Eugène Boudin Eugène Louis Boudin (; 12 July 18248 August 1898) was one of the first French landscape painters to paint outdoors. Boudin was a marine painter, and expert in the rendering of all that goes upon the sea and along its shores. His pastels, summary ...

* Hippolyte Boulenger * Paul Cornoyer *

Gustave Courbet Jean Désiré Gustave Courbet ( , , ; 10 June 1819 – 31 December 1877) was a French painter who led the Realism movement in 19th-century French painting. Committed to painting only what he could see, he rejected academic convention and ...

* Pierre Emmanuel Damoye * Constant Dutilleux * Antonio Fontanesi *

Nicolae Grigorescu Nicolae Grigorescu (; 15 May 1838 – 21 July 1907) was one of the founders of modern Romanian painting. There is a metro station named after Grigorescu in Bucharest. It was given his name in 1990, before which it was named after Communist army ...

* Winckworth Allan Gay * H. I. Marlatt * Adolphe Joseph Thomas Monticelli * Paul Trouillebert * Albert Charpin * Charles Olivier de Penne

References

Sources

* Catalogues des Collections des Musees de France. Ministère de la culture. (Catalogs of Collections of Museums of France. Ministry of Culture.) * Osborne, Harold (ed), ''The Oxford Companion to Art'', 1970, OUP,

External links

Hecht Museum

Cambridge Art Gallery
{{Authority control Artist colonies French art movements French artist groups and collectives Realism (art movement)