Barbizon School Of Art Movement

Barbizon School of Art Movement, Barbizon Paintings & Artists.

The Barbizon School Art Movement was part of an artistic movement toward realism in art, which emerged with regard to the overwhelming Romantic Movement of the time. The town of Barbizon in France, close to the Forest of Fontainebleau, is where it takes its name from. It is one of the most famous villages in art history.

It took the French to recognize John Constable's greatness.

In 1824 the Salon de Paris exhibited the works of English painter John Constable. His provincial scenes inspired some of the younger artists of the time to surrender formalism and to draw inspiration from nature. During the Revolutions of 1848, artists gathered at Barbizon to follow Constable's ideas.

Théodore Rousseau, Jean-François Millet, and Charles-François Daubigny founded the Barbizon school; other members included Jules Dupré, Constant Troyon, Charles Jacque, Narcisse Virgilio Díaz, Pierre Emmanuel Damoye, Charles Olivier de Penne, Henri Harpignies, Gabriel-Hippolyte Lebas, Albert Charpin, Félix Ziem, François-Louis Français, Émile van Marcke, and Alexandre Defaux

Poor People Become Fashionable in Art.

In addition to the landscapes, Millet brought peasant life into the paintings. In The Gleaners, Millet depicts three peasant women working at the harvest. Gleaners are poor people who are allowed to gather scraps after the completion of the main harvest. Here, the workers in the field are exalted by a composition that transforms them into heroic protagonists, bathed in a solemn and sacred atmosphere. In this acclaimed painting, the depth of the horizon and the peaceful hours in the field give Romantic respectability to the difficult, back-breaking work of the poor gleaners.

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot had first painted outdoors in the backwoods of Chailly in 1822, but in the spring of 1829, he traveled to Barbizon to paint in the Forest of Fontainebleau. He returned to Barbizon in the fall of 1830, where he made drawings and oil studies. From these, he made a painting intended for the Salon of 1830 View of the Forest of Fontainebleau. In the summer of 1834, for that year's Salon, another Forest of Fontainebleau was created. While there, he met many members of the Barbizon school: Théodore Rousseau, Paul Huet, Constant Troyon, Jean-François Millet, and the young Charles-François Daubigny.

During the late 1860s, the Barbizon painters attracted the attention of a younger generation of future famous artists studying in Paris. Several of those artists traveled to the Fontainebleau Forest to paint the landscape, including Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley and Frédéric Bazille. In the 1870s, those artists, among others, developed the art movement called Impressionism and practiced Plein air painting. Painters in different nations were likewise affected by this art. Starting in the late nineteenth century, many artists came to Paris from Austria-Hungary to study the new movement.

The American Barbizon School.

The American Barbizon School was a gathering of painters and styles somewhat affected by the French Barbizon School, who were noted for their straightforward, peaceful scenes painted from nature. American Barbizon artists focused on painting country scenes, including peasant workers or farm animals. William Morris Hunt was the first American to work in this artistic movement, as he trained with Jean-François Millet in 1851–1853. When he left France, Hunt set up a studio in Boston and worked in the Barbizon style, introducing the style to the United States. The American Barbizon course of events began later and was, for the most part, not acknowledged until the 1880s, when it achieved its apex of fame in the 1890s.

1. Instead of using the natural landscape as a background for sensational events, they turn it into the subject of their artwork.
2. Its tonal qualities, color, free brushwork and delicate quality of form distinguish this type of art.
3. The topics also included figures, peasant figures, scenes of peasant life, and work in the fields.

Adapted in part from Wikipedia