Fine Paintings Of The Barbizon School

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 work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Théodore Rousseau (1812–1867), arguably the most important French landscape artist of the mid-nineteenth century and a leader of the so-called Barbizon School, occupies a crucial moment of transition from the idealizing effects of academic painting to the radically modern vision of the Impressionists. He was an experimental artist who rejected the traditional historical, biblical, or literary subject matter in favor of “unruly nature,” a Romantic naturalism that confounded his contemporaries with its “bizarre” compositional and coloristic innovations. Lavishly illustrated and thoroughly documented, this volume includes five essays by experts in the field. Scott Allan and Édouard Kopp alternately examine Rousseau’s diverse techniques and working procedures as a painter and as a draftsman, as well as his art’s mixed economic and critical fortunes on the art market and at the Salon. Line Clausen Pedersen’s essay focuses on Mont Blanc Seen from La Faucille, Storm Effect, an early touchstone for the artist and a spectacular example of the Romantic sublime in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek’s collection. This catalogue accompanies an eponymous exhibition on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum from June 21 to September 11, 2016, and at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek from October 13, 2016, to January 8, 2017.