The Barbizon School & the Origins of Impressionism - Hardcover

Adams, Steven

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0714829196 ISBN 13: 9780714829197

Publisher: Phaidon Press, 1994

Synopsis

In 1863 Claude Monet and Frederic Bazille left Paris for Barbizon, a small village on the edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau, forty miles south-west of Paris. They came to this district to paint from nature in the open air and to make studies for landscape paintings, far from the pressures of city life. Together with Renoir and Sisley, they were following a well-trodden path taken by painters and tourists some thirty years earlier. Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot had been studying the fleeting effects of nature in the forest as early as 1822, and in the 1840s Charles-Emile Jacque, Gustave Courbet, Charles-Francois Daubigny and Jean-Francois Millet made frequent visits to the area, some later taking up permanent residence. Like many innovators, the Barbizon painters have attracted less attention than their followers. The names of Theodore Rousseau, Narcisse Diaz de la Pena and Georges Michel have virtually been forgotten, and the originality of their painting techniques and impulsive brush work attributed to those who later exploited them.
In this first survey of the Barbizon School for twenty years. Steven Adams re-evaluates the generation of landscape painters that preceded the Impressionists and illustrates the direct relationship between the paintings of Corot and Monet, Millet and Van Gogh. He examines the development of landscape painting in nineteenth century France from the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in 1816 to the outbreak of the Franco Prussian War in 1870, and discusses the cultural and political changes that influenced a more naturalistic painting style fifty years before the term 'Impressioniste' was first heard in Paris.

About this title

About the Author

Steven Adams teaches art history at the School of Art and Design at the University of Hertfordshire and is a freelance lecturer at the Victoria and Albert Museum and the National Gallery in London.

From Library Journal

The group of French painters who came to be known as the Barbizon School took their name from the tiny village southwest of Paris where they often worked. Drawing their inspiration from 17th-century Dutch and more recent English landscape painting, the Barbizon painters developed a philosophy of landscape realism informed by the sociopolitical climate of the Bourbon Restoration. The coalescence in the 1840s of a "school" united in its opposition to Classical conventions was a signal event in the history of modern art, laying the groundwork for such later and more celebrated innovators as the Impressionists and the Fauves. Adams's book, a painstakingly researched and beautifully illustrated account of this important period in French history, is the first to appear in many years. He has taken particular care to discuss the stylistic and thematic antecedents of the school and to show how these influences are manifested in the work of individual painters. A superb investigation of a long-overshadowed subject; recommended for all collections.
Douglas F. Smith, Oakland P.L., Cal.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Phaidon Press
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0714829196
• ISBN 13: 9780714829197
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240