THE BARBIZON SCHOOL
The term “Barbizon school” has been extended from its narrower meaning, in which it merely comprises Rousseau, Diaz, Millet and the disciples who joined them, to form a little artistic colony on the edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau, to a less accurate but now generally accepted wider application, embracing “the men of 1830,” who collectively and individually set out, inspired indirectly by Constable, upon the conquest of light and atmosphere through intimate communion with nature. In a pedantic survey of this Barbizon school, Rousseau would have to take honour of place as the leader of the group, whilst Corot and Daubigny, neither of whom actually worked at Barbizon, would have to be altogether excluded. But in the more liberal interpretation of the term, which we have here adopted, Jean Baptiste Camille Corot (1796–1875) must be given first place as the doyen of the whole group, since he alone was born before the eighteenth century had run its course.
COROT
Corot, the son of a coiffeur and a modiste in comfortable circumstances, was destined in his youth for the drapery trade, and was only enabled to follow his bent for the artistic profession when, at the age of twenty-five, he entered into possession of a small annual allowance, sufficient to meet his modest requirements and to save him from the desperate struggle for very existence which was the fate of some of his later friends and companions. His early work from nature had already laid the foundations for his subsequent style when he entered the studio, first of the academic painter Michallon, and then of Bertin. In 1825 Corot went to Rome, where he painted, among many pictures of equally rich luscious quality, the View of the Forum Romanum (No. 139), and the View of the Coliseum (No. 140), which he himself bequeathed to the State. Although these early works have none of the elusive charm and lyrical feeling of his mature style, and are of rather topographic character, they reveal in every touch the artist enamoured of atmosphere and of the quality of pigment. The touch is precise, but not tight. The two pictures were painted in 1826, but already they hold more than a hint of that unrivalled mastery of tone-values which found supreme expression in A Street in Douai (No. 141f), painted in 1871.
From the precision of his early manner Corot gradually advanced to freedom and airy looseness of touch; from statement of fact, to the suggestion of the very spirit and essence of nature in terms of paint that, more than any other artist’s work, justify the expression “colour music.” His later canvases are filled with the soft shimmer of vibrating atmosphere and with the tender poetry of dawn and dusk. Whilst retaining a truly classic sense of style, and adapting nature to his purposes by arrangement and generalisation, he never fails to convince the beholder of the reality of the scene represented. Even if his glades are peopled with dancing nymphs and satyrs, as in A Morning (No. 138), these mythical beings no longer suggest classic statuary, but they belong as much to the landscape as do the trees and shrubs and clouds, as do the peasant woman and the cow in The Dell (No. 2801, [Plate XLIX.]), or the piping shepherd in the exquisite Souvenir d’Italie: Castel Gandolfo (No. 141b). Of the twenty-two paintings by the master at the Louvre, no fewer than twelve form part of the Thomy Thiéry Bequest to which the great French national collection owes so many of its chief treasures of nineteenth-century art.
T. ROUSSEAU
The real head of the Barbizon school was Théodore Rousseau (1812–1867), who was one of the first exponents of the “romantic” as opposed to the “classic” landscape. If Corot was the lyric, Rousseau was the epic poet of Nature. In his early works he was considerably influenced by Constable, but he failed for a long time to gain the approval of the public and of the Salon juries. Fourteen times in succession his pictures were refused admission to the Salon, and success only came to him late in life. In 1851, at about the same time as Millet, he settled at Barbizon, on the outskirts of the Forest of Fontainebleau, where henceforth he found the subjects for his pictures. Rousseau was a most conscientious artist, who “constructed a group of trees with the care that an Academician puts into the construction of a nude figure.” His love of accurate detail did not, however, make him lose sight of the general effect. His insistence on bold silhouettes made him favour the sunset hour when, as in his masterpiece, An Opening in the Forest at Fontainebleau (No. 827), the trees would form effective dark masses against the glowing sunset sky. More characteristic of his favourite manner of composition is the imposing group of oak trees in the middle of a plain in the picture known as Les Chênes (No. 2900). In this, as in Marais dans les Landes (No. 830), which was bought in 1881 for £5160, and, indeed, in all the pictures where cattle are introduced, it will be noticed that the animals form part and parcel of the landscape, and are no longer individual “portraits” of animals, as they were apt to be in the pictures by the earlier Dutch cattle-painters. The same unity of vision is to be noted in all his sixteen pictures at the Louvre.
PLATE XLIX.—JEAN-BAPTISTE CAMILLE COROT
(1796–1875)
No. 2801.—THE DELL
(Le Vallon, avec des paysannes et une vache)
A grass-covered hill descends from the horizon line on the left to the right-hand bottom corner of the picture. A low hedge with a clump of trees in the centre divides the grassy plot from the field rising beyond towards the horizon-line, from which projects a church in the far distance. The sun is behind the trees, which throw a deep shadow on the dale. A cow occupies the centre of the foreground. To the left a group of three peasant women and a child; to the right a farm labourer.