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The Barbizon School in Painting
The Barbizon School was a circle of French landscape painters who, from about 1830 to 1870, settled around the village of Barbizon on the edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau and painted directly from nature rather than composing idealised landscapes in the studio. A Barbizon landscape painting is the first modern French landscape, and it is what a small oil on panel of the 1850s usually turns out to be.
They issued no manifesto and founded no academy. They were friends who agreed on one radical idea, that a stand of oaks or a marsh under a low sky deserved the patient attention academic painters reserved for scenes from Ovid and Virgil.
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| Paristhe studios they all left | 35 miles |
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| 120 miles |
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| 700 miles |
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| 3,600 miles |
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| Every ambitious painter was expected to go to Rome. These men went thirty-five miles and stayed. | ||||
Who was there
The Painters of the Barbizon School |
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| The circleLodged at Père Ganne's inn, into the forest each morning |
Théodore Rousseau 1812—1867 · the leader, settled 1847 Charles-François Daubigny 1817—1878 · rivers, from a studio boat Narcisse Diaz de la Peña 1807—1876 · forest undergrowth Jules Dupré 1811—1889 · skies and storm Constant Troyon 1810—1865 · cattle Charles Jacque 1813—1894 · sheep |
| The godfather | Camille Corot 1796—1875. Older than the rest and never a resident, but his work overlapped so completely with theirs that the movement is unthinkable without him. |
| The neighbour | Jean-François Millet 1814—1875. Settled at Barbizon in 1849 and died there, but his subject was the peasant figure rather than the land, which puts him in the Realist current alongside Courbet. |
Barbizon is a village an hour south of Paris. From the 1830s onward these painters began spending long stretches there, lodging at the inn run by Père Ganne and walking into the forest each morning with their panels and paint boxes.
The Salon resisted at first. Rousseau was rejected so persistently through the 1830s and 1840s that he became known as le grand refusé. By the 1850s the tide had turned, and by the 1870s Barbizon landscape paintings were being collected well beyond France, in Britain and above all in the United States. When Monet, Renoir and Pissarro began their own experiments in the 1860s, these painters had already spent two decades dismantling the academic landscape.
Start with the colour
Barbizon or Impressionist, Reading the Palette |
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| Barbizon | |||||||
| Ochre, raw sienna, olive knocked down with brown, muted green-grey, umber in the shadows, a cool grey-blue sky. The actual colour of a French forest, which is mostly muted. | |||||||
| Impressionist | |||||||
| Cobalt, pure green, chrome yellow, vermilion, violet in the shadows. The new tube pigments, used at full strength. Thirty years later, and a different chemistry. |
The difference is not only taste. Rousseau simply did not have the pigments Monet would buy in the 1870s. Industrial chemistry gave the next generation cobalt, chrome and the new violets in collapsible tubes, and they used them at full strength. Hold a Barbizon canvas beside an Impressionist one and the chemistry shows before anything else does.
Five more signs
How to Recognise a Barbizon Landscape Painting |
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| A low horizon | The sky usually takes half the composition or more, built in layered washes. Barbizon was as much about weather as about land. | |
| Trees as architecture | A single tree, often an oak, dominating one side and anchoring the whole design. The forest, not the cathedral, is the structural element. | |
| Small figures, at work | Where figures appear they belong to the landscape rather than command it. A shepherd, a woman drawing water, a cattle herd. They are at work, not at leisure, and they never take over the composition. | |
| Evidence of plein air | Rapid brushwork, thin paint that lets the ground of the panel show through, and compositional decisions a painter only makes standing in front of the subject. | |
| Panel or canvas | The outdoor studies are usually on small wood panels, often under fifteen inches, small enough to carry into the field. The finished Salon pictures are on canvas. |
The negative test
No togas, no temples, no allegory.
A painting that carries the whole vocabulary above and any of those three is not Barbizon.
Three rules
Buying a Barbizon Landscape Painting |
The panel is the tell. A small oil on wood panel under fifteen inches, painted thinly with the ground showing through, is almost certainly an outdoor study rather than a studio picture. That is the object the school was built on, and it is what most often comes to market.
Signed, and usually so. Unlike the Old Master field these painters signed, and the followers signed too. A signature places the canvas but does not settle whether the painter was in the circle or working in its manner twenty years later.
Circle and follower are the working terms. Autograph Rousseau and Daubigny are museum pictures. What a collector meets is the wider school, painted in the same forest by trained professionals, and what each term claims is set out in our guide to reading attribution.
In public collections
Where to See the School |
Théodore Rousseau, Une avenue, forêt de l'Isle-Adam, 1849. Musée du Louvre, Paris.
Camille Corot, Souvenir de Mortefontaine, 1864. Musée du Louvre, Paris.
Charles-François Daubigny, Banks of the Oise at Auvers. Saint Louis Art Museum.
Constant Troyon, Cattle Drinking. Walters Art Museum, Baltimore.
Jean-François Millet, The Gleaners, 1857. Musée d'Orsay, Paris.
Jean-François Millet, The Angelus, 1857-59. Musée d'Orsay, Paris.
The Rest of the Series
This guide is the pillar of our series on the French nineteenth-century landscape school. Four companion guides go further into its subjects. Shepherds and their flocks, haystacks before and after Monet, the figures who inhabit these landscapes, and the generation that followed.
Sources. Musée du Louvre, Musée d'Orsay, Saint Louis Art Museum, Walters Art Museum.
