The Barbizon school

The Barbizon painters were section of a movement towards realism in art which arose in the context of the dominant Romantic Movement of that time period.

In 1824 the Salon de Paris exhibited works of John Constable. His rural scenes influenced a few of the younger artists of that time period, moving them to abandon formalism and also to draw step by step inspiration straight from nature. Natural scenes had become the subjects of these paintings rather than mere backdrops to dramatic events.

Through the Revolutions of 1848 artists gathered at Barbizon to follow along with Constable’s ideas, making nature the topic of their art painting techniques.

One of them, Jean-François Millet, extended the theory from landscape to figures - peasant figures, scenes of peasant life, and is employed in the fields. In The Gleaners (1857), Millet portrays three peasant women working on the harvest. There is no drama and no story told, merely three peasant women in the field. Gleaners are poor women gathering what’s left following the rich those who own area of finished harvesting. The owners and their laborers are noticed in the rear of the painting. Millet here shifted the focus, the topic matter, from the rich and prominent to the people 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 every day work.

The leaders of the Barbizon school were Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, Théodore Rousseau, Jean-François Millet and Charles-François Daubigny; fellow members included Jules Dupré,Constant Troyon, Charles Jacque, Narcisse Virgilio Diaz, Charles Olivier de Penne, Henri Harpignies, Gabriel Hippolyte LeBas (1812-1880), Albert Charpin, Félix Ziem, François-Louis Français and Alexandre DeFaux.

Both Rousseau (1867) and Millet (1875) died at Barbizon.