Barbizon School

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The Barbizon School was a movement of French landscape painters who gathered around the village of Barbizon, on the edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau, from about 1830 to 1870. By painting directly from nature rather than composing in the studio, they changed the course of French art and prepared the way for Impressionism.

In the 1830s, a group of painters began settling in and around Barbizon, a small village on the edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau, some sixty kilometres from Paris. They were reacting against the academic system of their time, which reserved its highest honours for historical and mythological subjects painted in the studio. Inspired in part by the English landscapes of John Constable, shown at the Paris Salon of 1824, artists such as Théodore Rousseau and Camille Corot chose instead to study nature directly. The light of a clearing, the weight of a storm cloud, the changing seasons of the forest.

Their standing changed with the Revolution of 1848. The Salon held that year sat without a jury, and painters who had been refused again and again through the 1830s and 1840s were finally shown. Between roughly 1830 and 1870, Barbizon became the informal capital of French landscape painting. Jean-François Millet brought the human figure into the movement with his scenes of peasant labour, painted with a gravity previously reserved for history painting. Charles-François Daubigny worked from a studio boat on the Oise, Narcisse Diaz painted the forest undergrowth, and Constant Troyon and Charles Jacque made animals in the landscape a genre of their own. By the 1860s their work was collected across Europe and America.

The movement faded as its founders died, Rousseau in 1867 and Millet in 1875, both at Barbizon. Its influence, however, only grew. The Barbizon habit of painting outdoors, directly before the subject, prepared the ground for Impressionism. Monet, Renoir and Sisley all painted in the Forest of Fontainebleau in the 1860s before turning to the light of the Seine valley. Barbizon pictures also shaped landscape schools abroad, from the Hague School in the Netherlands to American Tonalism.

The most direct link to the movement in our own collection is Charles Edmond Renault, who studied under Camille Flers, Corot and Théodore Rousseau themselves, and then painted the rivers of the Paris region for half a century. Alongside him, Eugène Forest, who painted haystacks nine years before Monet. James Desvarreux-Larpenteur, trained in the studio of Émile van Marcke and faithful for forty-five years to the same flowering heather country. And Paul Emmanuel Peraire, a dedicated painter of the French countryside.

To learn to read these canvases the way a collector does, the tree, the figure, the grey light, see our collecting guide to the Barbizon School in painting.