Barbizon School

Barbizon School, a group of French painters, who worked in or near the town of Barbizon, on the edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau, in north-western France, from the mid-1840s to about 1870. They were chiefly landscape painters, but also painted animals and people of the region.

Artists of the Barbizon School were united by their opposition to painterly conventions and the idealized style and historical subject-matter favoured by the conservative French Academy. They were inspired by the contemporary English tradition of landscape painting (particularly the work of John Constable and Richard Parkes Bonington) and also by 17th-century Dutch landscpe painters, and were pioneers in France in that they treated landscape as a subject worthy of attention in its own right. Members of the group were also distinguished by their habit of painting oudoors (although they finished their paintings in the studio). In this, and in their insistence on naturalness and informality and their use of fresh colours, they were the precursors of Impressionsism.

Members of the Barbizon School included Théodore Rousseau, who was its nominal leader; Charles-François Daubigny; Narcisse-Virgile Diaz; Jules Dupré; Charles-Emile Jacque and Constan Troyon. Much of their work was done in the Forest of Fontainebleau. Each had an individual style, however and individual preferences for different types of landscape.