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 towards

Realism Realism, Realistic, or Realists may refer to: In the arts *Realism (arts), the general attempt to depict subjects truthfully in different forms of the arts Arts movements related to realism include: *Classical Realism *Literary realism, a move ...

in art, which arose in the context of the dominant Romantic Movement of the time. The Barbizon school was active roughly from 1830 through 1870. It takes its name from the village of Barbizon, France, on the edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau, where many of the artists gathered. Most of their works were landscape painting, 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 displaye ...

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 Jules Louis Dupré (April 5, 1811 – October 6, 1889) was a French painter, one of the chief members of the Barbizon school of landscape painters. If Corot stands for the lyric and Rousseau for the epic aspect of the poetry of nature, Dupré i ...

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, and

Narcisse Virgilio Díaz Narcisse Virgilio Díaz de la Peña (20 August 180718 November 1876) was a French painter of the Barbizon school. Early life Diaz was born in Bordeaux to Spanish parents. At the age of ten, Diaz became an orphan, and misfortune dogged his early y ...

. Jean-François Millet 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 Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot ( , , ; July 16, 1796 – February 22, 1875), or simply Camille Corot, is a French landscape and portrait painter as well as a printmaker in etching. He is a pivotal figure in landscape painting and his vast ...

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,

Albert Charpin Albert Charpin, born in Grasse, Alpes-Maritimes in 1842, died in Asnières-sur-Seine in 1924. He was a naturalist painter associated with the Barbizon school. He painted real objects in a natural setting. A pupil of Charles-François Daubigny ...

François-Louis Français François-Louis Français (1814–1897), also known as Louis Français, was a French painter, lithographer and illustrator who became one of the most commercially successful landscape painters of the 19th century. A former pupil of Jean Gigoux ...

, and

Émile van Marcke Émile van Marcke, born Charles Émile van Marcke de Lummen (15 August 1827, Sèvres – 24 December 1890, Hyeres), was a French cattle painter.Courrier de l'art: Volume 6 Eugène Véron, Paul Leroi - 1886 "A. L'Enclos, épreuve avant la let ...

. Many of the artists were also

printmaker Printmaking is the process of creating work of art, artworks by printing, normally on paper, but also on fabric, wood, metal, and other surfaces. "Traditional printmaking" normally covers only the process of creating prints using a hand proce ...

s, mostly in etching but the group also provided the bulk of the artists using the semiphotographic cliché verre technique. The French etching revival 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 John Constable (; 11 June 1776 – 31 March 1837) was an English landscape painter in the Romanticism, Romantic tradition. Born in Suffolk, he is known principally for revolutionising the genre of landscape painting with his pictures of Dedha ...

, 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 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,

came to Barbizon to paint in the Forest of Fontainebleau. 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,

, Jean-François Millet, and the young

. Millet extended the idea from

landscape A landscape is the visible features of an area of land, its landforms, and how they integrate with natural or man-made features, often considered in terms of their aesthetic appeal.''New Oxford American Dictionary''. A landscape includes the ...

to figures — peasant figures, scenes of peasant life, and work in the fields. In '' The Gleaners'' (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 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 ...

to paint the landscape, including Claude Monet,

Pierre-Auguste Renoir Pierre-Auguste Renoir (; 25 February 1841 – 3 December 1919) was a French artist who was a leading painter in the development of the Impressionist style. As a celebrator of beauty and especially feminine sensuality, it has been said that "R ...

, Alfred Sisley and

Frédéric Bazille Jean Frédéric Bazille (December 6, 1841 – November 28, 1870) was a French Impressionist painter. Many of Bazille's major works are examples of figure painting in which he placed the subject figure within a landscape painted ''en plein air''. ...

. In the 1870s those artists, among others, developed the art movement called Impressionism and practiced ''

plein air ''En plein air'' (; French for 'outdoors'), or ''plein air'' painting, is the act of painting outdoors. This method contrasts with studio painting or academic rules that might create a predetermined look. The theory of 'En plein air' painting ...

'' 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 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 ''Daubigny's Garden'', painted three times by Vincent van Gogh, depicts the enclosed garden of Charles-François Daubigny, a painter whom Van Gogh admired throughout his life. Van Gogh started with a small study of a section of the garden. Then ...

. 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 to study the new movements. For instance, the Hungarian painter

János Thorma János Thorma (24 April 1870 – 5 December 1937) was a Hungarian painter. A representative figure of the Nagybánya artists' colony, which started in 1896, in Nagybánya, Austria-Hungary (today Baia Mare, Romania), He moved through differ ...

studied in Paris as a young man. In 1896 he was one of the founders of the

Nagybánya artists' colony The Nagybánya artists' colony was an art colony in Nagybánya, a town in eastern Hungary that became Baia Mare in Romania after World War I. The colony started as a summer retreat for artists, mainly painters from Simon Hollósy's ''szabadiskola' ...

in what is now Baia Mare, Romania, which brought impressionism to Hungary. In 2013 the Hungarian National Gallery 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, originally Swiss, settled in Barbizon in 1849.

László Paál László Paál (30 July 1846, Zam, Hunedoara, Zám, Transylvania, Austrian Empire - 4 March 1879, Charenton-le-Pont, France) was a Hungarian Impressionist landscape painter. Life He was descended from a noble family and his father was a postma ...

, 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 The American Barbizon School was a group of painters and style partly influenced by the French Barbizon school, who were noted for their simple, pastoral scenes painted directly from nature. American Barbizon artists concentrated on painting rur ...

by William Morris Hunt. Several artists who were also in, or contemporary to, the Hudson River School 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 United States, American landscape painting, landscape painter. Now recognized as one of the most influential American artists of the nineteenth century, Inness was influenced b ...

, who sought to emulate the works of Rousseau. Paintings from the Barbizon school also influenced landscape painting in California. The artist

Percy Gray Henry Percy Gray (1869–1952) was an American painter. Gray was born on October 3, 1869 into a San Francisco family with broad literary and artistic tastes. He studied at the San Francisco School of Design and later under William Merritt Chase ...

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 ,

, ''View of the Forest of Fontainebleau'' (1830) File:The Old Oak by Jules Dupré, c1870.jpg,

, ''The Old Oak,'' c. 1870,

National Gallery of Art The National Gallery of Art, and its attached Sculpture Garden, is a national art museum in Washington, D.C., United States, located on the National Mall, between 3rd and 9th Streets, at Constitution Avenue NW. Open to the public and free of char ...

Washington, DC. ) , image_skyline = , image_caption = Clockwise from top left: the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall, United States Capitol, Logan Circle, Jefferson Memorial, White House, Adams Morgan, Na ...

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 *

Hippolyte Boulenger Hippolyte Emmanuel Boulenger (3 December 1837 – 4 July 1874) was a Belgian landscape painter influenced by the French Barbizon school, considered to be "the Belgian Corot". Biography Hippolyte Boulenger was born to French parents in Tournai ...

Paul Cornoyer Paul Cornoyer (1864–1923) was an American painter, currently best known for his popularly reproduced painting in an Impressionist, tonalist, and sometimes pointillist style. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Cornoyer began painting in Barbizon styl ...

* Gustave Courbet *

Pierre Emmanuel Damoye Pierre Emmanuel Damoye (20 February 1847 – 23 January 1916) was French artist who was regularly recognized by a broad range of art critics as one of the most significant heirs to the Barbizon school tradition. He studied his craft at the Éco ...

Constant Dutilleux Constant Dutilleux (5 October 1807, Douai - 21 October 1865, Paris) was a 19th-century French painter, illustrator and engraver. He was the great-grandfather of the composer Henri Dutilleux. Dutilleux preferred landscape paintings. He was main ...

Antonio Fontanesi Antonio Fontanesi (23 February 1818 – 17 April 1882) was an Italian painter who lived in Meiji period Japan between 1876 and 1878. He introduced European oil painting techniques to Japan, and exerted a significant role in the development of mo ...

* Nicolae Grigorescu *

Winckworth Allan Gay Winckworth Allan Gay (1821–1910) was an American landscape artist and was one of the first American artists to promote the Barbizon style of pastoral landscape painting. He studied art in the United States, including West Point and then France ...

* H. I. Marlatt *

Adolphe Joseph Thomas Monticelli Adolphe Joseph Thomas Monticelli (October 14, 1824 – June 29, 1886) was a French painter of the generation preceding the Impressionists. Biography Monticelli was born in Marseille in humble circumstances. He attended the École Municipale de ...

Paul Trouillebert Paul Désiré Trouillebert (1829 in Paris, France – 28 June 1900 in Paris, France) was a famous French Barbizon School painter in the mid-nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. Life and career Trouillebert is considered a portrait, an ...

Charles Olivier de Penne Charles Olivier de Penne (Paris, January 11, 1831 - Bourron-Marlotte, April 18, 1897) was a French painter. He belonged to the School of Barbizon. Biography Charles-Olivier de Penne was initially a painter of historical scenes, but, as soo ...

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
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