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Group of French painters associated with the Forest of Fontainebleau near Paris and especially with the village of Barbizon. The main members of this informal group were Narcisse Diaz, Jules Dupr?, Th?odore Rousseau, Constant Troyon and Jean-Fran?ois Millet; they formed a recognizable school from the early 1830s to the 1870s. Mainly concerned with landscape, they had little interest in the classical conventions of Claude and Poussin and were more influenced by Dutch landscape painting of the 17th century and by the works of John Constable, whose Hay Wain (1821; London, N.G.) had been exhibited at the Salon of 1824. Because their work did not change radically over the decades, the Barbizon painters have often been treated mainly as a transitional generation, helping to bridge the gap between classical landscape painting of the late 18th century and the early 19th and Impressionism. However, as the first generation of French landscape painters to focus truly on nature, they have an importance and originality of their own. Romantic in their desire to break with conventions, their anti-urban sentiment and, above all, their lyrical appreciation of nature, they were Realist in their avoidance of the heroic, their preference for humble themes and sometimes in their technique.
See the Abbreviations for further details.
Bibliography
See American Art Assn., Master Prints of the Barbizon School (1970); studies by J. Bouret (tr. 1973) and C. R. Sprague (1982).

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The Barbizon school of painters were part of an art movement towards Realism in art, which arose in the context of the dominant Romantic Movement of the time. The Barbizon school was active roughly from 1830 through 1870. It takes its name from the village of Barbizon, France, near Fontainebleau Forest, where the artists gathered. Some of the most prominent features of this school are its tonal qualities, color, loose brushwork, and softness of form.[1]
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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.[2] 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.[3] 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.
Théodore Rousseau, Barbizon landscape, ca. 1850, Pushkin Museum, Moscow
Charles-François Daubigny Rising Moon in Barbizon, c. 1850s, Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent
Constant Troyon, The Ford, 1852, Louvre
Charles Jacque, The Old Forest, c. 1860s, Brooklyn Museum
Narcisse Virgilio Díaz, Forest of Fontainebleau, 1868, Dallas Museum of Art
Jules Dupré, The Old Oak, c. 1870, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.
Henri Harpignies, Landscape with two figures, c. 1870s, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam
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