The Barbizon School

Theodore Rousseau - The Village of Becquigny - c. 1857-64 - Oil on panel - 25 x 39 3/8 in. (63.5 x 100 cm) - Frick Collection, New York (click photo for larger image)The Barbizon School was a group of landscape artists working in the area of the French town of Barbizon, south of Paris. They rejected the Academic tradition, abandoning theory in an attempt to achieve a truer representation of life in the countryside, and are part of the French Realist movement. Theodore Rousseau (1812-1867) is the best-known member of the group. Other prominent members included Constant Troyon and Charles-Francois Daubigny. Realist painters Jean-Francois Millet and Camille Corot are also sometimes loosely associated with this school. The Barbizon School artists are often considered to have sown the seeds of Modernism with their individualism, and were the forerunners of the Impressionists, who took a similar philosophical approach to their art.