CategoriesStyles and Movements
Barbizon School
French landscape painters who worked in and around the forest of Fontainebleau from the 1830s, painting nature and rural life directly.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
No open-access works for Barbizon School are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.
About
The village of Barbizon lies at the edge of the forest of Fontainebleau, some 60 kilometres south-east of Paris. From the 1830s painters stayed for weeks, sketching oaks, boulders, clearings and ponds in every weather. Théodore Rousseau settled in the village and campaigned to protect parts of the forest from logging; Narcisse Diaz de la Peña, Jules Dupré and Charles Jacque joined him, and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot often worked nearby.
Their paintings favour modest motifs over grand scenery: a cart track, a stand of trees at sunset, sheep coming home. The handling is looser than the Salon expected, and the palette runs to earthy browns and greens. Jean-François Millet, who moved to Barbizon in 1849, put peasants at the centre of pictures such as The Gleaners (1857). Charles-François Daubigny painted rivers from a studio boat. The young Impressionists learned from them, as did painters in the Netherlands and the United States.
Related artists
More in Styles and Movements
Baroque
Bauhaus
Bay Area Figurative Art
Beijing East Village
Bengal School of Art
Black Arts Movement
Black Mountain College
.jpg%3Fwidth%3D960&w=3840&q=75)