History
In 1824 the Salon de Paris exhibited works of John Constable. His rural scenes influenced some of the younger artists of the time, moving them to abandon formalism and to draw inspiration directly from nature. Natural scenes became the subjects of their paintings rather than mere backdrops to dramatic events.
During the Revolutions of 1848 artists gathered at Barbizon to follow Constable's ideas, making nature the subject of their paintings.
One of them, Jean-François Millet, extended the idea from landscape to figures — peasant figures, scenes of peasant life, and work in the fields. In The Gleaners (1857), Millet portrays three peasant women working at the harvest. There is no drama and no story told, merely three peasant women in a field. Gleaners are poor women gathering what's left after the rich owners of the field finished harvesting. The owners and their laborers are seen in the back of the painting. Millet here shifted the focus, the subject matter, from the rich and prominent to those at the bottom of the social ladders. Millet also didn't paint their faces to emphasize their anonymity and marginalized position. Their bowed bodies are representative of their everyday hard work. The French landscape became a major theme of the Barbizon painters. During the late 1860s the Barbizon painters attracted the attention of a younger generation of French artists studying in Paris. Several of those artists visited 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.
The leaders of the Barbizon school were Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, Théodore Rousseau, Jean-François Millet, and Charles-François Daubigny; other members included Jules Dupré, Constant Troyon, Charles Jacque, Narcisse Virgilio Diaz, Pierre Emmanuel Damoye, Charles Olivier de Penne, Henri Harpignies, Gabriel-Hippolyte Lebas (1812–1880), Albert Charpin, Félix Ziem, François-Louis Français, Emile van Marcke, and Alexandre Defaux.
Both Rousseau (1867) and Millet (1875) died at Barbizon.
Read more about this topic: Barbizon School
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