Barbizon School - A Stan Klos Website
Barbizon School
By Neal McLaughlin
Time will never stand still. Neither man nor beast can stop the passing of
time. As the seconds quickly click from the vintage alarm clock bring forth-new
perspectives, ideas and goals, man's nature is to race and to keep up with the
continuously changing times.
The world of art is no different. As the human race has struggled to keep
up with the ever-changing world, the art of the time has reflected this change.
Whether the artists considered the change bad or good it was reflected in their
movements.
In the mid 1830's, as the French cities began to fall to pollution and the
forest and rivers began to disappear into the roadways of today, several artists
left their Paris Salons and headed southeast for the outdoors of a small village
on the outskirts of the Forest of Fontainebleau.
Upon arriving in Barbizon, founders of the movement, Theodore Rousseau
(1812-1867), Georges Michel (1763-1843) and Jean-Francois Millet (1814-1875)
abandoned the precedent of the Academic tradition, opting instead to portray a
more natural, truer representation of the French countryside.
Abandoning their studios, the landscape painters of the Barbizon School
elected to paint directly out of doors, where it was possible to closely study
nature. Their subject matter did not portray the rich and noted people of
France, but instead concentrated on the working class scattered throughout their
new homeland.
Influenced by the elements of the seventeenth-century Dutch landscapes and
the English traditional landscape paintings, the "plein-air" painters chose
subject matters such as grave-diggers, farmers and poachers in addition to their
natural landscape renderings.
While artists like Rousseau, Michel, Jean-Baptist Corot (1796-1875) and
Constant Troyon (1810-1865) were rebelling against the social changes in France,
Millet, was dedicated to depicting the land in which he once worked so that
others would deeply ponder the lives of those who lived and worked the
countryside.
Although called a "school", the Barbizon group was actually working on
developing the style and cultural elements of the traditional
seventeenth-century Dutch and English landscape painting with emphasis on human
solitude in nature.
The painters of the Barbizon group, inspired by English artist John
Constable's landscape paintings and renderings of nature, succeeded in
establishing country themes and landscape paintings as vital subject matters for
the French artists. By fostering an interest in visible reality, the Barbizon
School can be accredited with successfully paving the way for the Realists and
the Impressionists who took a similar philosophical approach to their art.
Art is an ever changing field of endeavor. Some movements or styles
withstand the rigors of time while others fall quickly to the wayside. However,
what is important in the movements of art is that usually a preceding movement
or style is the foundation upon which the next movement is built.
It is very interesting to explore the growth of the various art movements;
but even more interesting to contemplate what may have happened in the world of
art if even the shortest of movements had never occurred at all.
Research Links
The Barbizon School: Artists and their Works
| Artcyclopedia Artists by Movement: The
Barbizon School. ... Chronological Listing of Barbizon School Members Use
ctrl-F (PC) or command-F (Mac) to search for a name. |
ArtLex on Barbizon School
| Barbizon school art, painting, prints,
defined with images of examples from art history, great quotations, and
links to other resources. Click Here. ... |
19th Century Art at Heart's Ease Gallery
| 19th Century Barbizon School. ... The
Painters of the Barbizon School helped establish landscape and themes of
country life as vital subjects for French artists. ... |
Barbizon school - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Barbizon school. From Wikipedia, the free
encyclopedia. (Redirected from Barbizon School). The Barbizon school is
named after the ... |
Barbizon school. The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. 2001
| ... 2001. Barbizon school. ... Paintings of
the Barbizon school were very popular with American collectors of the late
19th and early 20th cent. ... |
Barbizon school
| Barbizon school. The Barbizon school is
named after the village of Barbizon near Fontainebleau Forest, France. The
leaders of the ... |
Barbizon School Art - Artists, Artworks and Biographies
| Barbizon School: The Barbizon School of
French landscape painting derived its named from Barbizon village in
northern France, where most of the school’s ... |
BARBIZON SCHOOL
| The leaders of the school of
Barbizon were: Georges Michel, Théodore Rousseau, Jean-François Millet and
Corot. ... |
MSN Encarta - Barbizon School
| ... Barbizon School. Barbizon School, group
of French painters, who from about 1830 to 1870 lived in or near the town of
Barbizon, at the edge of the forest of... |
Barbizon School
| ... Barbizon School. The Wood Sawyers is
one of French painter Jean François Millet’s paintings ennobling the hard
labour of rural life. ... |
The Museum of Foreign Art :
| Finnish National Gallery. Sinebrychoff: The
Barbizon School. In the 1820s and '30s a group of French artists left Paris
and took up ... |
Barbizon school -- Encyclopædia Britannica
| Barbizon school mid-19th-century French
school of painting, part of a larger European movement toward naturalism in
art, that made a significant contribution ... |
