The Barbizon school, championing nature and landscape painting, is the French counterpart of the Hudson River school.
Like the painters of the Hudson River School, the Barbizon painters are part of a movement towards realism in art in reaction to the more formalized romantic movement of the time.
Both schools employ the newly available range of mauves, violets, intense yellows and bright greens.
Named after the village of Barbizon near Fontainebleau Forest, France, where the artists had gathered during the Revolutions of 1848 to follow Constable's ideas, the school’s leaders are Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, Théodore Rousseau, Jean-François Millet and Charles-François Daubigny; other members include Jules Dupré, Narcisse Virgilio Diaz, Henri Harpignies, Constant Troyon, Félix Ziem and Alexandre DeFaux.
Millet, extends the idea from landscape to figures—peasant figures, scenes of peasant life, and work in the fields.
In The Gleaners (1857), Millet portrays three peasant women working at the harvest.
There is no drama and no story told, merely three peasant women in a field.
