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The Barbizon school of painters is named after the village of Barbizon near Fontainebleau Forest, France. The leaders of the Barbizon School were Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, Théodore Rousseau, Jean-François Millet, and Charles-Francois Daubigny, and other members included Jules Dupré, Narcisse Virgilio Diaz, Henri Harpignies, and Félix Ziem
In the early 19th century the French Art Establishment had become very formalised following the tradition of Jacques-Louis David. Out of this grew the Romantic Movement, as exemplified by Théodore Géricault, Richard Bonington, and Eugène Delacroix.
In 1824 the Paris Salon exhibited some of the works of John Constable, and his rural scenes had a great influence on some of the younger artists of the time, leading them to abandon formalism and to draw their inspiration directly from nature. Natural scenes were to become the subjects of their paintings rather than mere backdrops to dramatic events.
During the Revolution of 1848 the group gathered at Barbizon to follow Constable's ideas, to make nature itself the subject of their paintings. One of them, Millet, extended the idea from landscape to figures: peasant figures, scenes of peasant life, and work in the fields. “The Gleaners” by Jules Breton (1857) is an example of this: three peasant women working at the harvest. There is no drama and no story told, merely three peasant women in a field.
Both Rousseau (1867) and Millet (1875) died at Barbizon.
See also Gustave Courbet
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