Barbizon School

Barbizon school (bär'bĭzōN`, bär`bĭzŏn'), an informal school of French landscape painting that flourished c.1830–1870. Its name derives from the village of Barbizon, a favorite residence of the painters associated with the school. Théodore Rousseau was the principal figure of the group, which included the artists Jules Dupré, Narciso Diaz de la Peña, Constant Troyon, and Charles Daubigny. These men reacted against the conventions of classical landscape and advocated a direct study of nature. Their work was strongly influenced by 17th-century Dutch landscape masters including Ruisdael, Cuyp, and Hobbema. Corot and Millet are often associated with the Barbizon group, but in fact Corot's poetic approach and Millet's humanitarian outlook place them outside the development of the school. The Barbizon painters helped prepare for the subsequent development of the impressionist schools. Paintings of the Barbizon school were very popular with American collectors of the late 19th and early 20th cent. and influenced American painters of this period. The school is well represented in American collections, notably the Corcoran Gallery, the Isaac Delgado Museum of Art, New Orleans, the Metropolitan Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Bibliography

See American Art Assn., Master Prints of the Barbizon School (1970); studies by J. Bouret (tr. 1973) and C. R. Sprague (1982).

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Barbizon school

Group of 19th-century French landscape painters. They were part of a larger European movement toward naturalism that made a significant contribution to realism in French landscape painting. Led by Theodore Rousseau and Jean-François Millet, they attracted a large following of painters who came to live at Barbizon, a village near Paris; most notable of this group were Charles-François Daubigny, Narcisse-Virgile Díaz de la Peña, Jules Dupré, Charles-Émile Jacque, and Constant Troyon. Each had his own style, but all emphasized painting out-of-doors directly from nature, using a limited palette, and creating atmosphere or mood in their landscapes.

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Barbizon School 

a group of French masters of realistic landscape painting of the 1830’s to 1860’s. It received its name from the village of Barbizon near Fontainebleau (southeast of Paris), where some of the members of the group did a great deal of painting.

The Barbizon school began during an upswing of the democratic movement, the development of national realistic art, and a crisis of the academic and romantic schools. In contrast to the idealization and conventionality of the “historical landscape” of the academics and the romantic cult of the imagination, the Barbizon school affirmed the aesthetic value of real nature in France—its forests and fields, rivers and mountain valleys, and towns and villages in their everyday aspects. In consistently creating a realistic system of landscape painting, the Barbizon artists drew on the heritage of Dutch 17th-century painting and the work of the English landscape painters of the early 19th century, John Constable and R. Bonington. First and foremost, however, they developed the realistic tendencies of French landscape painting of the 18th and first quarter of the 19th centuries—especially G. Michel and the leading masters of the romantic “school, T. Géricault, E. Delacroix, and P. Huet. The Barbizon painters freed landscape painting from the prescribed norms and observed and studied various areas of France directly. Besides Barbizon, they worked in many districts of Ile-de-France, Picardy, Normandy, Burgundy, Auvergne, Dauphiné, and others. They strove to individualize landscape subjects and to represent various states of nature, light, and air. The Barbizon painters attached great importance to artistic generalization and to the spiritual nature of the landscape—its emotional and visual integrity and its ties linking nature and the daily lives of ordinary people. Work from nature on a study or a picture and the artist’s intimate association with nature were combined in the Barbizon school with a tendency toward an epic breadth of images sometimes akin to a peculiar kind of romanticism and heroism. Chamber pictures were alternated with large landscape canvases. The Barbizon school systematically developed a method of tonal painting, restrained and at times almost monochromatic, rich in fine hues and nuances of light and color—subdued brown, ochre, and green tones are vitalized by occasional loud accents. The composition in the landscapes of the Barbizon school is natural but carefully constructed and balanced.

The older generation of Barbizon artists, T. Rousseau, J. Dupré, N. V. Diaz, preserving a definite tie with the romantic school, accentuated the heroic principles of the landscape, its plastic qualities, the material nature of the images, and the emotional role of light. The greatest representative of the younger generation, C. F. Daubigny, attached a great deal of importance to spontaneous impressions and an exact definition of the states of the surrounding air and light. A number of the Barbizon artists and the masters who were close to them, such as C. Troyon, C. Jacque, and R. Bonheur, attached substantive importance to genre and animal images in landscape painting, which were an organic part of the texture of the picture in the works of the leading artists. Many French painters of the 19th century show a closeness to the Barbizon school—for example, C. Corot in a number of his landscapes. J. F. Millet, who worked for many years in Barbizon, had particularly close ties with the Barbizon school. The influence of the Barbizon school on the subsequent development of realistic landscape painting was great in France (G. Courbet and E. Boudin) and in other countries (the Dutch artist J. B. Jongkind, the Belgian H. Boulenger, the Hungarians M. Munkacsy and L. Paal, the Pole J. Szermentowski, the Rumanian N. Grigorescu, the American landscape painter G. Inness, and the Russian landscape painters A. P. Bogoliubov, A. K. Savrasov, and F. A. Vasil’ev).

REFERENCES

Iavorskaia, N. V. Peizazh barbizonskoi shkoly. Moscow, 1962.
Dorbec, P. L’art du paysage en France. Paris, 1925.