Barbizon Realism Impressionism In France

Published on the occasion of a series of exhibitions that will travel throughout North America, Europe, and Asia from Feb. 2011 to Feb. 2014.

The key painters associated with the Barbizon School - Corot, Millet, Rousseau and Courbet - are among the finest landscape artists of the nineteenth century. From their base at the village of Barbizon in the Forest of Fontainebleau, just outside Paris, they painted nature as they saw it, anticipating many of the techniques and effects of Impressionism. In this survey Steven Adams re-evaluates French landscape painting in the half-century before Impressionism, placing this 'return to nature' against the background of the rapid industrialization and political crises of the period.

This is the newest volume in the National Gallery of Art's Systematic Catalogue, a series that presents and describes the Gallery's holdings of painting, sculpture, photographs, and decorative arts. This richly illustrated volume includes the work of such early nineteenth century French painters as Ingres, Courbet, Gericault, Delacroix, and Millet.

These paintings - dreams of nature as a web of life in which human beings occupy a peripheral role - overwhelmed Rousseau's contemporaries with their novel light effects, original perspective, and "sheer profusion of visual sensation." While Baudelaire considered them superior to even Corot's works, they baffled art critics and have never fit convincingly into the received categories of naturalism, "pre-Impressionism," or modernism."--Jacket.