BARBIZON PAINTERS

Although often termed an artistic school of Romantic-era France, the Barbizon painters were only sometimes united by place: the village of Barbizon on the edge of the Fontainebleau forest. Only thirty miles southwest of Paris yet not quite the suburbs, Barbizon was home to an artists' colony from the 1820s that thrived into the 1870s. The old-growth forest (preserved originally as hunting grounds for the king) provided a range of pictorial motifs from ancient oaks and massive boulders to sandy wastelands. Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796–1875) and some of his followers worked there first in the early 1820s; after the hospitable and economical Auberge Ganne inn opened its doors in 1824, the seasonal bohemian community trooped down from Paris each year in greater numbers. However, few artists associated with Barbizon stayed there for very long; many passed through for just part of a season. When the train line from Paris was extended to Fontainebleau in 1849, the artists' colony became so open to city visitors that artists complained it had become almost a suburb of Paris. By the mid-1850s, painters and the tourists that followed them had become such a large component of the local economy that Barbizon's saint's day festival was changed from winter to late spring to become a large-scale spectacle.

As early as the 1850s, the artistic community at Barbizon had the reputation of being an alternative to the Italianate tradition taught in the École des beaux arts; as such, it attracted an international contingent of artists such as the American painters William Babcock (1826–1899) and William Morris Hunt (1824–1879), who encouraged the purchase of Barbizon paintings by American collectors. In the 1860s, the young painters Jean-Fréderic Bazille (1841–1870) and Claude Monet (1840–1926) (who later would be prominent impressionists) spent summers away from their academic instruction, painting in the forest of Fontainebleau. Artists' colonies sprung up in many nearby towns such as Marlotte, home to playwright Henri Murger (1822–1861) after 1850. The novelist brothers Edmond de Goncourt (1822–1896) and Jules de Goncourt (1830–1870) visited both Marlotte and Barbizon in the 1860s while doing research for their novel of the bohemian artists' life, Manette Solomon. After 1870, Barbizon had become a chic vacation spot and spa town.

the paintings

Barbizon painters used a traditionally dark palette but left broad brushstrokes visible in the finished

work. Dutch seventeenth-century landscapes and the rustic, painterly works of British artist John Constable (1776–1837) were very influential. Due to innovations in artists' materials, namely the recent invention of the portable easel and the marketing of oil paint in metal tubes, the artist could work from nature with more ease than ever before. Typically, Barbizon landscape paintings convey an effect of unfiltered visual sensation before nature; such unmediated freshness was the consequence of painting out of doors and on the spot. This new plein air approach implied a reversal of values in which a personal, subjective response to nature was given priority over the ideal landscape then promoted by the classically minded École de beaux arts in its prize for historical landscape painting (paysage historique). Although Barbizon painting was radical in that sketchy, painterly responses to nature were exhibited as finished works, working from direct observation of landscape had roots in seventeenth-century landscape practices. What was new was a shift of assumptions: what had previously been merely a practice of collecting natural views with the goal of recombination and idealization in the studio became an end in itself. Nature, formerly an artistic backdrop for human activity, moved to center stage. And it was the French landscape, close to Paris and neither sublime like the Alps nor conventionally beautiful like the outskirts of Rome, that was now the focus. The forest interior was a staple of Barbizon artists; unlike the classical landscape format that depicts natural forms as defined entities, the certainty of a vista is sacrificed to immerse the viewer's senses in nature. Barbizon painting set an important example for the impressionist style that emerged in the late 1860s; it encouraged young artists to work freely and quickly out of doors, from the visual sensation of the French landscape rather than from an idealized notion of art.

criticism and reception

Critics noted that landscape paintings without traditional narrative subjects were increasingly being shown in the Paris Salons of the 1830s. Sometimes indistinguishable one from another, these painters of forest interiors, marshy clearings, and humble peasant scenes were grouped together as the "School of 1830." By midcentury, each critic proposed a different leading figure of this landscape-based school and each labored to define his divergent terms. There were, however, some intersections among the so-called Barbizonnières: most of these men had youthful memories of the July Revolution of 1830 and had experienced the Revolution of 1848 as adults. They had their feet in both the Romantic and realist movements and only cohered as a group by their dedication to the French landscape and their opposition to the classical grip that the Academy still had on the Salons.

Industrialists and other newly monied bourgeoisie, ironically, bought Barbizon paintings with enthusiasm. Unlike large-scale history painting, these typically small paintings were affordable, enjoyable, and thus suitable for the décor of an urban apartment. Art dealers successfully marketed Barbizon painting as a democratic art form that was easy to understand without a privileged education. Its somewhat nostalgic view of nature and the French peasantry was constructed with an urban viewer in mind who appreciated the artists' immersion in nature.

the artists

Among the acclaimed Barbizon painters who arrived in the 1830s was Narcisse-Virgile Diaz de La Peña (1808–1876), a charismatic painter of horizonless forest interiors, gypsies, and orientalist fantasies. Also arriving in the 1830s were Jules Dupré (1811–1889) and Théodore Rousseau (1812–1867), who like Diaz found their landscape motifs among the ancient oaks and great boulders of the forest of Fontainebleau. Constant Troyon (1810–1865) was also among this early group in the forest and he later became a specialist in animal genre painting, as did the year-round resident and breeder of pedigree chickens Charles-Émile Jacque (1813–1894). The painting style of Charles-François Daubigny (1817–1878) is closely associated with this group, although he preferred to paint views along the banks of the river Oise and he settled in the town of Auvers-sur-Oise. Unlike the later impressionists, this was not an urbane group that frequented cafés or showed their work apart from the official Salon. Some painted side by side, and many of these somewhat reclusive artists developed strong friendships.

The most acclaimed artists of Barbizon were its few year-round painters. Rousseau spent many summers and the last decade of his life there; Jean-François Millet (1814–1875) arrived in 1849 fleeing the cholera that ravaged Paris on the heels of the Revolution of 1848. Rousseau came to be known as "the great refused one" because his dark, painterly landscapes were so consistently excluded by the classically oriented Salon juries from 1836 to 1841. His unfortunate technique of multiple layers of pigments and varnish has caused many of his landscapes to permanently darken. After the Revolution of 1848, the defiant stance taken by the Barbizon painters against the conservative ideal soft he Academy had broad appeal as a Republican, anti-authoritarian aesthetic. In the short-lived Second Republic (1848–1852), Rousseau received his first official commission and won medals of honor, but continued

to struggle with the classical prejudices of the Academy until his death in 1867. Rousseau's ecological sentiments were ahead of his time: from the 1840s onward, the artist lobbied for the preservation of the forest.

Millet's memories of his childhood in coastal Normandy informed his many rural images, such as The Sower (1850). Popular biography of the later nineteenth century celebrated him as the one "true peasant" of Barbizon with the most authentic contact with rural life. Primarily a painter of the figure, after relocating from Paris to Barbizon in 1849 Millet focused on the French peasant. Although the poverty and piety of his youth was greatly exaggerated by late-nineteenth-century biographers, Millet had a sustained and informed interest in depicting the rituals of seasonal rural labor. Millet rarely worked from models or in the landscape, preferring to refine his drawings until he had achieved the essence of a bodily gesture. Many critics have pointed to the classicism underlying his compositions. As seen in The Gleaners (1857), his attitude seemed to have been sometimes nostalgic, sometimes ambivalent to the changes that the peasantry were undergoing due to rural depopulation and increasingly mechanized agricultural practices. Millet denied politicized interpretations of his paintings yet continued to produce works that inspired readings of socialist sympathy for the plight of the impoverished peasant. In the case ofMan with a Hoe (1862), Millet proclaimed a fatalistic view of the peasants' bond to the soil. Like Rousseau, Millet was supported by leftist art critics like Théophile Thoré (1807–1869), who found their realist "savagery" crucial to the revitalization of art in France. Millet's death in 1875 and his ensuing deification as peasant painter encouraged many young artists to make pilgrimages to Barbizon and seek out rural subject matter in other artists' colonies that were being founded across Europe.

See alsoCorot, Jean-Baptiste-Camille; Impressionism; Millet, Jean-François; Painting; Realism and Naturalism.

bibliography

Adams, Steven. The Barbizon School and the Origins of Impressionism. London, 1994.

Brown, Marilyn. "Barbizon and Myths of Bohemianism." In Barbizon: Malerei der Natur, Natur der Malerei, edited by Andreas Burmester, Christoph Heilmann, and Michael Zimmerman. Munich, 1999.

Green, Nicholas. The Spectacle of Nature: Landscape and Bourgeois Culture in Nineteenth-Century France. Manchester, N.Y., 1990.

Herbert, Robert L. Barbizon Revisited. New York, 1962.

Jacobs, Michael. The Good and Simple Life: Artist Colonies in Europe and America. Oxford, U.K., 1985.

Lübbren, Nina. Rural Artists' Colonies in Europe, 1870–1910. New Brunswick, N.J., 2001.

McWilliam, Neil. "Mythologizing Millet." In Barbizon: Malerei der Natur, Natur der Malerei, edited by Andreas Burmester, Christoph Heilmann, and Michael Zimmerman. Munich, 1999.

Thomas, Greg M. Art and Ecology in Nineteenth-Century France: The Landscapes of Théodore Rousseau. Princeton, N.J., 2000.

Maura Coughlin