Barbizon school

The Barbizon school of painters were part of an art movement towards Realism in art, which arose in the context of the dominant Romantic Movement of the time. The Barbizon school was active roughly from 1830 through 1870. It takes its name from the village of Barbizon, France, on the edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau, where many of the artists gathered. Most of their works were landscape painting, but several of them also painted landscapes with farmworkers, and genre scenes of village life. Some of the most prominent features of this school are its tonal qualities, color, loose brushwork, and softness of form. The main artists of Barbizon were Millet, Rousseau, Díaz, Dupré, Troyon, Daubigny, Paul Huet and Corot.

map (2012) of French municipality 'Barbizon', including the location of the Forest of 'Fontainebleau', where the artists lived and worked, frequently painting in open air.

Quotes

• You are sitting under the trees, feeling all the ease, all the tranquility that can possibly be enjoyed; you see some poor figure laden with a faggot come turning out of some little path. The unexpected and always striking way in which this figure appears to you carries your mind instantly to the sadness of human life.. .In tilled lands you see these figures digging and delving. From time to time you see one straighten his loins and wipe his forehead with the back of his hand. Is this the gay frolicsome work in which some people would have us believe? Yet here for me is the real humanity, the great poetry.
  • Jean-François Millet, from his letter in 1851; as quoted in Millet, by Romain Rolland, - translated from the French text of M. Romain Rolland by Miss Clementina Black; published: London, Duchworth & Co / New York, E. P. Dutton & Co, p. 11+12

• Aligny was there [in Barbizon], and Diaz, and Rousseau, and Rousseau's instructions on the palette were the 'point de départ' [starting-point] of the real talent of Diaz, for colour. At this period [after 1836] the fine studies of the 'Grand Refusé' [1] (Rousseau) were a revelation to the quondam painter [Diaz!] of porcelain, who had been struggling, all alone, to purge himself of the traditions of the 'peinture' of the 'apothecaries' gallipot, and the chocolat cup.. .Diaz was conquered immediately by Rousseau, and his admiration for him remained for ever, the conviction and the religion of all his life.
  • Souvenirs sur Theodore Rousseau, fr:Alfred Sensier, (Paris, 1872); as quoted in The Painters of Barbizon 1. – Millet, Rousseau and Diaz, by John W. Mollett, B.A.; publ. Sampton Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, Limited, London, 1890, p. 96

• A curious work has been compiled, by a number of the most popular authors of our period, in honour of the chaotic landscape beauties of the forest [of Barbizon], and of Monsieur Dènecourt, its Columbus and their over-wrought enthusiasm in their praises of the place, and the volcanic irregularity of the forest itself, are quite in harmony with their retarded adulation of the painters living there and the eruption brought about by those painters in the classical world of art that preceded them. The book is entitled a Hommage to M. Dènecourt, a retired politician of the Reds, who was a sort of 'Old Mortality' to the forest
  • 'Introduction of The Painters of Barbizon I. [2] – Millet, Rousseau and Diaz, by John W. Mollett, B.A.; publ. Sampton Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, Limited, London, 1890, p. xi

External links

• Encyclopedic article on Barbizon school at Wikipedia
• Media related to Barbizon school at Wikimedia Commons
• collections of pictures of art-works by the Barbizon-artists, on Wikiart
• biography-texts 'Barbizon days : Millet - Corot - Rousseau - Barye', by Charles Sprague Smith, 1906
• complete text in pdf of 'The Painters of Barbizon I. – Millet, Rousseau, Diaz', by John W. Mollett, 1890
• complete text in pdf of 'The Painters of Barbizon II. – Corot, Daubigny, Dupré', by John W. Mollett, 1890