Barbizon Ile-de-France France

Natural scenes now become the subjects of their paintings rather than mere backdrops to dramatic events.

The Salon de Paris of 1824 had exhibited works by John Constable, whose rural scenes have influenced some of the younger artists, moving them to abandon formalism and to draw inspiration directly from nature.

Barbizon, a village bordering the Fontainebleau forest, about thirty miles (fifty kilometers) south of Paris, is to become the center of this new movement towards realism in painting, which has arisen in the context of the dominant Romantic Movement.

Known as the Barbizon school, the movement’s adherents, primarily landscape painters—Théodore Rousseau and Narcisse Virgilio Diaz are early members—usually paint outdoors in restrained hues, and often at twilight, to evoke the look and mood of their native countryside.

Most of the Barbizon painters finish their original sketches in the atelier.

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.