Barbizon School

Barbizon school, mid-19th-century French school of painting, part of a larger European movement toward naturalism in art, that made a significant contribution to the establishment of Realism in French landscape painting. Inspired by the Romantic movement’s search for solace in nature, the Barbizon painters nevertheless turned away from the melodramatic picturesqueness of established Romantic landscape painters as well as from the classical academic tradition, which used landscape merely as a backdrop for allegory and historical narrative. The Barbizon artists painted landscape in realistic terms and for its own sake. They based their art on the works of 17th-century French and Dutch and contemporary English landscape painters, all of whom approached their subject with sensitive observation and a deep love of nature.

The name of the school was taken from the village of Barbizon, on the edge of the great forest of Fontainebleau near Paris, where the school’s leaders, Théodore Rousseau and Jean-François Millet, driven from Paris by poverty and lack of success, settled in 1846 and 1849, respectively. They attracted a large following of landscape and animal painters, some going to live at Barbizon, others visiting only infrequently; those of the group who were to become most notable were Charles-François Daubigny, Narcisse-Virgile Diaz de La Peña, Jules Dupré, Charles Jacque, and Constant Troyon, all of whom had had indifferent success in Paris.

Each Barbizon painter had his own style and specific interests. Rousseau’s vision was melancholy, concentrating on vast sweeps of landscape and looming trees. Dupré’s close-range, detailed scenes are suffused with foreboding. Daubigny favoured scenes of lush, verdant fields, and Diaz painted sun-dappled forest interiors. Troyon and Jacque painted placid scenes that featured livestock. Millet, the only major painter of the group for whom pure landscape was unimportant, made monumental paintings of peasants that celebrate the nobility of human life in sympathy with nature. All of these artists, in spite of their Romantic inspiration, emphasized the simple and ordinary rather than the terrifying and monumental aspects of nature. Unlike their English contemporaries, they had little interest in the surface effects of light and colour or in atmospheric variations. Instead, they emphasized permanent features, painting solid, detailed forms in a limited range of colours. They were also concerned with mood, and they altered physical appearances to express what they saw as the objective “character” of the landscape.

Having suffered for some time from a total lack of recognition, the Barbizon painters began to gain popularity by mid-century. Most won official recognition from the Académie des Beaux-Arts and started receiving large prices for their paintings; their work was particularly popular at the end of the century. Some of the Barbizon painters were masters of composition and description; others were less competent. But their historical importance is undeniable, for as a group they were instrumental in establishing pure, objective landscape painting as a legitimate genre in France.