Article: Barbizon School
Barbizon School
To view our Barbizon School paintings
Part of our Art Movements & Schools series. For a collector's perspective, read our full guide to The Barbizon School in Painting, and meet our Barbizon School painters.
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.
Origins: Leaving the Studio Behind
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 kilometers from Paris. They were reacting against the academic system of their time, which reserved its highest honors 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 Theodore Rousseau (1812-1867) and Camille Corot (1796-1875) chose instead to study nature directly: the light of a clearing, the weight of a storm cloud, the changing seasons of the forest.
Origins (1824-1848) · The Great Years (1848-1867) · Twilight and Legacy (1867-1875)
The Movement at Its Height
Between roughly 1830 and 1870, Barbizon became the informal capital of French landscape painting. Jean-Francois Millet (1814-1875) brought the human figure into the movement with his scenes of peasant labor, painted with a gravity previously reserved for history painting. Charles-Francois 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. Rejected at first by the official Salon, the Barbizon painters gradually won recognition for their sincerity, and by the 1860s their work was collected across Europe and America.
Decline and Legacy
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.
Barbizon in Our Collection
GalerieClub holds signed Barbizon School landscapes on canvas and on wood panel, including works by Eugene Forest (1808-1891), who painted haystacks nine years before Monet, and Paul Emmanuel Peraire (1829-1893), a dedicated painter of the French countryside. These are the affordable originals of the school that taught Impressionism how to look at nature.
