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Developments in the 19th Century
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Art Styles
in 19th century -
Art Map
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The Birth of Realism
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Constant Troyon
Jules Dupre
see collection:
Narcisse Diaz de la Pena
Theodore Rousseau
Charles-Francois Daubigny
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As the Romantic movement waned, exponents of the visual arts sought to
depict
the world in a more literal way. Focus shifted away from idealism to a more
realistic rendering of nature, social relationships, and the characteristics
of the
individual, society, and the nation at large. This new realism assumed
various forms in the different countries where it took root.
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Realism was a historical movement that had a profound influence on
the literature and figurative arts of Europe. The most systematic and
coherent form evolved in France during the revolutions of 1830 and 1848.
It reached its peak during the Second Empire (1852-70) and began to wane
in the 1870s. In many different forms, and in varying measures of
intensity. Realism spread throughout Europe, from the Russia of
Alexander II to the Britain of Queen Victoria, from the Germany of
William I to the Italy of the Risorgimento, and from the Hapsburg empire
to Scandinavia and countries beyond Europe. The year 1855 was
significant in the establishment of Realism in Europe. It was the year
in which Gustave Courbet
(1819-77) exhibited his work in Paris in the Pavilion du Realisme, a
building that he himself paid for. He exhibited about forty paintings,
including A Burial at Ornans and The Painter's Studio,
which had been refused by the jury of the Exposition Universelle, who
instead hailed the work of more traditional masters such as
Ingres. In the same vear as
Courbet's provocative
debut, the painters of the Barbizon School showed their art for the
first time in a public exhibition. In 1855, the Italian Realist
painters, who later became known as the Macchiaioli, met up regularly in
the Caffe Michelangelo in Florence. In the field of criticism, the
novelist and critic Edmond Duranty published a magazine, Le
Realisme, which became the principal organ of the movement between
1856 and 1857. In Le Realisme, published by Champfleury in 1857,
the same year that Flaubert's Madame Bovary appeared, no single
definition of reality was proposed and no attempt was made to represent
a fixed world, as in the daguerreotypes of the period. Instead, the
world was seen as fluctuating and mobile and composed of complex
elements and contradictions, qualities that were central to the Realist
mode of expression.
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Gustave Courbet
The Painters Studio
1854-56
Musee d'Orsay, Paris.
Despite the picture representing, in the words of the artist, "a
real-life allegory",
the harsh realism in the treatment of the subject
and figures was judged unseemly and the work was refused by the Salon of
1855.
Delacroix, on the other hand, thought it worthy of praise.
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THE BARBIZON SCHOOL
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Between 1830 and 1850, the village of Barbizon - lying on the
outskirts of the Forest of Fontainebleau, just outside Paris —
became a meeting point for a group of artists that would take its
name. The major representatives of the Barbizon School were
Narcisse Diaz de la Pena
(1807-76), Constant Troyon (1810-65), Jules Dupre
(1811-89), Theodore Rousseau (1812—67), and
Charles-Francois Daubigny (1817-78). They did not confine
themselves to their immediate surroundings but roamed through the
French provinces, from the Auvergne to the Jura and from the Vendee
to Normandy. The school constituted a link between Romanticism and
Realism, paving the way for the Impressionists. Abandoning the
traditional 18th-century approach to landscape painting, the
Barbizon artists reverted to a simpler form taken from drawings and
oil studies sketched directly from nature. They took a particular
interest in the changes in nature from day to day and season to
season, recording them with free and subtle brushstrokes. Although
they anticipated the Impressionists in painting directly from
nature, they still executed their finished works in the studio. The
Barbizon artists were united in their opposition to academic
conventions and in their shared interest in landscape art, but each
had his own personal interpretation and style. In
Rousseau's
early-works there lingered an element of romanticism that manifested
itself in a sense of mystery, transcendence, and mystical
contemplation. He immersed himself in nature and the solitude of the
countryside in order to find himself. For this artist, nature became
a refuge and a place of nostalgia. It compensated for the
frustrations of the social and political hopes of the July
Revolution of 1830 and the revolution of February I848 (Rousseau
left Paris forever in 1849), as well as for his refusals by the
Salons of 1835 and 1837, and the disillusion engendered by the
growth of industrial society. Whereas
Rousseau tended to
favour a more solid and static pictorial structure, contrasting the
horizontal elements of the ground with the verticals of the trees,
Daubigny showed sensitivity to natural movement and
variations in light. There is nothing theatrical about his work -
the innumerable landscape views along the River Oise, which he often
painted from his studio boat. During the 1860s, his painting became
freer, embracing the vivacity of his sketches, at a time when the
bold innovations of the Barbizon School were beginning to be cramped
by its own formulae.
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Barbizon School
(Encyclopaedia Britannica)
mid-19th-century French school of painting, part of a larger
European movement toward naturalism in art, that made a significant
contribution to the establishment of Realism in French landscape
painting. Inspired by the Romantic movement's search for solace
innature, the Barbizon painters nevertheless turned away from the
melodramatic picturesqueness of established Romantic landscape
painters as well as from the classical academic tradition, which
used landscape merely as a backdrop for allegory and historical
narrative. The Barbizonartists painted landscape in realistic terms
and for its own sake. They based their art on the works of
17th-century French and Dutch and contemporary English landscape
painters, all of whom approached their subject with
sensitiveobservation and a deep love of nature.
The name of the school was taken from the village of Barbizon, on
the edge of the great forest of Fontainebleau near Paris, where the
school's leaders, Théodore Rousseau and Jean-François Millet, driven
from Paris by poverty and lack of success, settled in 1846 and 1849,
respectively. They attracted a large following of landscape and
animal painters, some going to live at Barbizon, others visiting
only infrequently; those of the group who were to become most
notable were Charles-François Daubigny, Narcisse-Virgile Diaz de La
Peña, Jules Dupré, Charles Jacque, and Constant Troyon, all of whom
had had indifferent success in Paris.
Each Barbizon painter had his own style and specific interests.
Rousseau's vision was melancholy, concentrating on vast sweeps of
landscape and looming trees. Dupré's close-range, detailed scenes
are suffused with foreboding. Daubigny favoured scenes of lush,
verdant fields, and Diaz painted sun-dappled forest interiors.
Troyon and Jacque painted placid scenes that featured livestock.
Millet, the onlymajor painter of the group for whom pure landscape
was unimportant, made monumental paintings of peasants that
celebrate the nobility of human life in sympathy with nature. All of
these artists, in spite of their Romantic inspiration, emphasized
the simple and ordinary rather than the terrifying and monumental
aspects of nature. Unlike their English contemporaries, they had
little interest in the surface effects of light and colour or in
atmospheric variations. Instead, they emphasized permanent features,
painting solid, detailed forms in a limited range of colours. They
were also concerned with mood, and they altered physical appearances
to express what they saw as the objective “character” of the
landscape.
Having suffered for some time from a total lack of recognition, the
Barbizon painters began to gain popularity by mid-century. Most won
official recognition from the Académie des Beaux-Arts and started
receiving large prices for their paintings; their work was
particularly popular at the end of the century. Some of the Barbizon
painters were masters of composition and description; others were
less competent. But their historical importance is undeniable, for
as a group they were instrumental in establishing pure, objective
landscape painting as a legitimate genre in France.
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Narcisse Diaz
de la Pena
born 1808, Bordeaux, Fr.
died Nov. 18, 1876, Menton
French painter and lithographer of the group of landscape painters
known as the Barbizon school, who is distinguished for his numerous
Romantic depictions of the forest of Fontainebleau and his landscape
fantasies with mythological figures.
At 15 Diaz began working as a ceramic painter for the
Sèvresporcelain factory. He studied for a time with the academic
painter Alexandre Cabanel. Strongly influenced by Delacroixand the
Romantics and attracted by medieval and Middle Eastern art, he often
in his early career painted exotic subjects.
About 1840 Diaz began to paint landscapes in the forest of
Fontainebleau near the village of Barbizon. These landscapes, which
dominated his work for the rest of his career, characteristically
have a pervasive sense of the shadowy seclusion of the forest; e.g.,
“Forest Scene” (1867; St. Louis [Mo.] Art Museum). Dense, vividly
coloured foliage is broken by spots of light or patches of sky
shining through the branches. During the last 15 years of his life
Diaz seldom exhibited publicly. He was helpful and sympathetic to
the Impressionists, especially Renoir, whom he met in 1861 painting
at Barbizon.
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see collection:
Narcisse Diaz
de la Pena
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Narcisse Diaz de la Pena
Landscape with a Pine-tree
1864
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Constant
Troyon
(b Sèvres, 28 Aug 1810; d Paris, 20 March 1865).
French painter. He was brought up among the Sèvres ceramics workers
and received his first lessons in drawing and painting from Denis-Désiré
Riocreux (1791–1872), a porcelain painter who was one of the
founders of the Musée National de Céramique. Troyon began his career
as a painter at the Sèvres factory while also studying landscape
painting in his spare time. He became a friend of Camille Roqueplan,
who introduced him to a number of young landscape
painters—especially Théodore Rousseau, Paul Huet and Jules Dupré—who
were later to become members and associates of the BARBIZON SCHOOL.
After an unremarkable début at the Salon of 1833, where he exhibited
three landscapes depicting the area around Sèvres (e.g. View of
the Park at Saint-Cloud; Paris U., Notre-Dame), he took up his
career in earnest and made several study trips to the French
provinces. Following the example of contemporary collectors, he
began to take a great interest in 17th-century Dutch painting,
particularly the work of Jacob van Ruisdael, whose influence is seen
in such early paintings as The Woodcutters (1839; La
Rochelle, Mus. B.-A.). At the Salon of 1841 he exhibited Tobias
and the Angel (Cologne, Wallraf-Richartz Mus.), a biblical
landscape that attracted the attention of Théophile Gautier. The
subject was intended to satisfy the critics, but the painting served
as a pretext for portraying a realistic and sincere representation
of nature, even though its ordered and classically inspired
composition perfectly fitted the requirements of a genre, the
origins of which were the 17th-century paintings of Claude and
Poussin and their followers.
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Constant Troyon
Beach At Trouville
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Constant Troyon
On The
Farm
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Constant Troyon
Approaching Storm
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Constant Troyon
Returning
From Pasture
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Constant Troyon
Cows
Grazing
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Jules Dupre
born April 5, 1811, Nantes, Fr.
died Oct. 6, 1889, L'Isle-Adam
French artist who was one of the leaders of the Barbizon group of
landscape painters.
The son of a porcelain manufacturer, Dupré started his career in his
father's works, after which he painted porcelain at his uncle's
china factory at Sèvres. He first exhibited paintings in 1831 and in
1834 was awarded a second-class medal at the Salon. Visiting England
in the same year, he learned, from the landscapes of John Constable,
how to express movement in nature. The districts of Southampton and
Plymouth, with their wide expanses of water, sky, and ground,
provided his subjects. Late in life, he joined the artists' colony
at Barbizon on the edge of the forest of Fontainebleau, where his
style evolved, gaining in breadth, or largeness of treatment, and
exhibiting greater simplicity in colour harmony.
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Jiles DupreLandscape with Cows
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Jiles Dupre
Vieux Chene Et Troupeau Au Bord
D'une Mare
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Pierre-Etienne-Theodore Rousseau
born April 15, 1812, Paris, France
died December 22, 1867, Barbizon
in full Pierre-Étienne-Théodore Rousseau French painter who was a
leader of the Barbizon school of landscape lainters. His direct
observation of nature made him an important figure in the
development oflandscape painting.
Rousseau, the son of a tailor, began to paint at age 14. In the
1820s he began to paint out-of-doors directly from nature, a novel
procedure at that time. Although his teachers were in the
Neoclassical tradition, Rousseau based his style on extensive study
of the 17th-century Dutch landscape painters and the work of such
English contemporaries as Richard Parkes Bonington and John
Constable. His early landscapes portray nature as a wild and
undisciplined force and gained the admiration of many of France's
leading Romantic painters and writers.
In 1831 Rousseau began to exhibit regularly at the French Salon. But
in 1836 his Descent of the Cattle (c. 1834) was rejected by the
jury, as were all his entries during the next seven years. Despite
the Salon's censure, his reputation continued to grow.
Rousseau first visited the Fontainebleau area in 1833 and, in the
following decade, finally settled in the village of Barbizon, where
he worked with a group of landscape painters, including
Jean-François Millet, Jules Dupré, Narcisse-Virgile Diaz de La Pena,
and Charles-François Daubigny. Their artistic goals were similar,
and they became known collectively as the Barbizon school. During
this period Rousseau produced such tranquil pastorals as Underthe
Birches, Evening (1842–44), reflecting the influence of Constable.
After the Revolution of 1848, the Salon briefly relaxed its
standards, and Rousseau finally received official recognitionas a
major figure in French landscape painting. His works were well
represented in the Universal Exposition of 1855, and he became
president of the fine-arts jury for the Universal Exposition of
1867. Rousseau's paintings represent in part a reaction against the
calmly idealized landscapes of Neoclassicism. His small, highly
textured brushstrokes presaged those of the Impressionists.
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see collection:
Pierre-Etienne-
Theodore
Rousseau |
Theodore Rousseau
Spring
1852
Musee du Louvre, Paris
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Charles-Frangois Daubigny
born February 15, 1817, Paris, France
died February 19, 1878, Paris
French painter whose landscapes introduced into the naturalism of
the mid-19th century an overriding concern for the accurate analysis
and depiction of natural light through the use of colour, greatly
influencing the Impressionist painters of the late 19th century.
In 1836, after a year-long study of the paintings of Old Masters in
Italy, Daubigny returned to Paris and began to paint historical and
religious works. In 1838, the same year he enrolled in the class of
Paul Delaroche at the École des Beaux-Arts, he exhibited at the
official Salon for the first time.
In his youth he had illustrated books, but his true leanings were
toward landscape painting as practiced by the Barbizon school, an
informal association of painters who rebelled against the formulas
of traditional landscape painting in favour of working out-of-doors,
directly from nature. Like Camille Corot, Daubigny painted in the
Morvan district, and in 1852, after the two had met, Daubigny's work
began to depend on a strict observation of tonal values fortified by
a concealed but indispensable minimum of compositional structure.
Such works, though calm and unspectacular, soon gained success, one
of them, Spring (1857), being bought by the emperor Napoleon III in
1857. Later in the 1850s, Daubigny's style, though still restrained,
began to express a more personal lyricism. He increasingly employed
graduated light reflections from surfaces to give effects of space;
such methods also were directed at conveying a momentary impression
of the landscape.
Although associated with the Barbizon school, Daubigny never lived
among them; he is best seen as a link between the more classically
organized naturalism of Corot and the less-formal visual
receptiveness of his young friends ClaudeMonet and Alfred Sisley.
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see collection:
Charles-Francois
Daubigny
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Charles-Francois Daubigny
View of the Banks of the Seine at Bezon
Musee du Louvre, Paris
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see collection:
Narcisse Diaz de la Pena
Theodore Rousseau
Charles-Francois Daubigny
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