News

We had a great opening for our annual Barbizon exhibition on November 11th.  It’s hard to believe, this year marks the 20th catalogued Barbizon exhibit at Galerie Michael.  This year’s exhibit, entitled Barbizon: The Birth of Impressionism, presents a thoughtful and in-depth look at the influence of this powerful and foundational movement sparked in the French countryside during the mid-1800s. (more…)

The annual Barbizon exhibition will open at Galerie Michael on November 11, 2011.   Barbizon: The Birth of Impressionism is a lively and layered show that presents the foundational work of the Barbizon Movement which pioneered the changing perspectives and radical techniques of Impressionism.

More than a gateway movement, the Barbizon artists created a body of work that is visually captivating and historically imperative in its own right.  The Barbizon Movement cast a wide net of pivotal influences from the simplistic ideals of rural life and painting outdoors to the larger movements of intellectualism, naturalism and the power of inspiration.

This year’s exhibit will feature over 30 works from the most prominent artists of the Barbizon Movement including Rosa Bonheur, Jules Dupre, Paul Huet, Constant Troyon, Diaz, de la Pena and many others.  For a deeper understanding of the historical and artistic significance of the Barbizon Movement, be sure to read Dr. Steven Adams’ essay on the formation and far-reaching influence of the Barbizon Movement as well as the biographies of many of the Barbizon artists in this year’s exhibit.

We look forward to seeing you at Galerie Michael on November 11, 2011 for the opening of Barbizon: The Birth of Impressionism.

Jules Dupre, oil on canvas, #911478

Peder Mork Monsted, oil on canvas, #911081

Georges Francois Laugee, oil on canvas, #911637

The upcoming Barbizon exhibit at Galerie Michael relied on the support and academic skill of Dr. Steven Adams of the University of Hertforshire to awaken the collection to its full potential.  Dr. Adams is well-versed in early nineteenth century French visual culture with a specific focus on French landscape painting.  He is the author of Barbizon and the Origins of Impressionism published by Phaidon Press and Impressionists published in 2000.

Steven Adams’ research interests center around landscape and national identity in early nineteenth century France, landscape gender and conceptions of Bohemianism, and the social and political production of space. Steven’s research interests also include the formation of modernism in nineteenth century France and French art during the Nazi Occupation. Steven is also involved in the supervision of practice-based research in art and design and its theoretical base, a theme addressed by the Faculty’s Centre for Research into Practice. He is currently working on a monograph on Theodore Rousseau and Barbizon painting.

To read more by Dr. Steven Adams, check out his recent publications:

• ‘Politics Space and Desire in Revolutionary France’, Journal for Landscape Research. Vol 35, 5 Oct 2010.
• ‘Renoir, la tradizione e l’altra faccia dell’impressionismo’, in K. Adler, (ed.) Renoir Tradition and Innovation, Rome: Skira, 2008.
• ‘Barbizon – souvenirs of French painting in the nineteenth century’, Galerie Michael, Beverly Hills Los Angeles, 2008.
• ‘Sèvres porcelain and articulation of power in Napoleonic France.’, Journal of Design History Vol. 20, No. 3. Dec. 2007.
• The Barbizon School, London: Phaidon Press, 1995 and 2000.
• ‘Signs of recovery, landscape and masculinity in 19th century France’ within Steven Adams and Anna Greutzner Robins, Gendering Landscape Art, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2000.
• Steven Adams and Anna Greutzner Robins, (eds.) Gendering Landscape Art, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2000.

Barbizon – un coup d’oeil
By Dr. Steven Adams

The Barbizon School takes its name from a small village on the edge of the Fontainebleau Forest, some forty miles to the south east of Paris. A train to nearby Melun and short coach ride to the village of Barbizon enabled the capital’s artists to escape from the city and to paint in the peace of the countryside. The forests and its environs offered a remarkable range of scenery. Mysterious rock formations left behind from the last Ice Age, some with mysterious powers to cure the sick, nestled among ancient oak trees. Pools of water gathered beneath majestic pines; here, peasants watered and grazed their livestock, continuing a way of life said to be unchanged for centuries. On the forest’s edge, dense woodland gave way to the desolate plains around Chailly-en Bière. And after a hard day’s work painting in the forest, artists were able to find companionship, a cheap meal* and a bed at Barbizon’s Auberge Ganne or Mother Anthony’s Inn at Marlotte. It was pleasures such as these that attracted the young Claude Monet, Frederic Bazille and Pierre-Auguste Renoir in the summer of 1866 and are documented fully in Georges Gassies compelling book on life in the village, Les beaux jours de Barbizon of 1906.

The Impressionists were by no means the first to paint in and around Barbizon. For well over half a century, painters had visited to the forest. Jean-Baptise-Camille Corot was first recorded painting in the 1820s; Théodore Rousseau and Narcisse Diaz de la Peña shortly after. Diaz was beguiled by Barbizon and its surroundings and was one of the first painters to take up permanent residence. Millet retired to the village in the 1840s to escape the outbreak of cholera in the capital where he remained for the rest of his life. It is still possible to visit his studio, now converted to a museum of the painter’s life and work. Others followed. Charles Jacques was so taken by the village and its traditions that he established a small-holding of livestock and poultry, both trademark figures in his pictures. Constant Troyon and Rosa Bonheur – eminent figures in the Paris art world – were visitors to the district as were Jules Dupré and the Daubignys. By the 1870s, the district was so famous it was known as the ‘cradle’ of French landscape painting attracting subsequent generations of painters from continental Europe and as far afield as Japan and the Unites States. Robert Louis Stevenson writing in Across the Plains said of the district: ‘The charm of Fontainebleau is a thing apart … The vigorous forest air, the silence, the majestic avenues of highway, the wilderness of tumbled boulders, the great age and dignity of certain groves … the air, the light, the perfumes, and the shapes of things concord in happy harmony.’

But why was Barbizon painting so important? Artists had long painted landscapes in the open air. The opportunity to paint not in the studio but before nature itself gave landscape painting a feeling of spontaneity and freshness. Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes’ guide to young artists written as early as 1800 recommended that artists make sketches in the open. Valenciennes and his contemporaries never imagined, however, that such works had a value other than preparatory studies to be used in the studio. Indeed, Valenciennes counseled that the best landscape painting were made with ‘closed eyes’ and should depict nature not as it is but in idealized form, as it was in the classical past. The Barbizon School turned this convention on its head and it is for this reason that its members occupy such an important position in the history of French art. The art critic Phillipe Burty, writing in the 1860s, described Barbizon painters as planting a ‘signpost’ in the terrain of French art pointing the way for later generations.

Known in France as the School of 1830, Barbizon painters challenged the authority of the art establishment and insisted that works made in the open should be celebrated not as sketches but as works in their own right. Paul Huet – represented in the current exhibition with three rare and important works – insisted that artists should be free to draw upon their own creative convictions rather than to follow the sterile prescription of the French Academy. Writing an article in the radical journal L’Artiste in 1831, Huet insisted that art was the expression of an individual spirit. Art should be wrested form the control of academicians and be subject to nothing other than the individual painter’s creative conviction. Evidence of the extent to which Huet and his contemporaries drew upon their own creative convictions is often visible in their pictures. Huet’s works are often briskly painted indicating that his works were done almost by instinct. Close examination of some of the Daubigny’s pictures similarly shows a rapid working process. Charles-François Daubigny, like many Barbizon painters, famously worked in the open making finished paintings in direct response to the sensations of nature. His Rainbow – on show in the current exhibition – shows an acutely sensitive depiction of the fragmentation of sunlight through water-vapor and is informed simply by objective vision. These are not stage-managed rainbows of the imagination but a record of a natural phenomenon. Pioneers of plein-air painting, Charles-François and Karl Daubigny, famously converted a small ferryboat into a floating studio to paint en-plein-air on the river Oise, a practice Monet and Manet famously used in many of their riverscapes around Asnières of the late 1870s.

Barbizon painting takes many and varied forms. While some of its members painted the subtle effects of light on the landscape others turned to the life and traditions of rural France. By the 1840s, France and continental Europe in general underwent an industrial revolution. Railroads were constructed and French wealth depended increasingly on the production of steel and chemicals. It was against this backdrop that many Barbizon collectors began to cherish rural traditions, many of which were steadily beginning to disappear as peasants left the country for the city in search of employment. The current exhibition contains magnificent examples of such romantic visions of country life some made by French artists like Troyon and others by painters such as Evariste Carpentier and Léon Gaud, respectively from Belgium and Switzerland. By the 1870s, the example of Barbizon painters had spread. But whatever turn Barbizon painting took, French painting became increasing concerned with recording the world around them with a spirit of immediacy.

Such was Barbizon’s importance that its influence endured well into the twentieth century. On the one hand, the Impressionist circle looked to Barbizon’s painters for inspiration and guidance. Diaz offered support to the young Renoir and Daubigny championed the cause of the Impressionists as the attempted to gain acceptance at the Paris Salon. Some like Monet, Sisley and Renoir continued to paint in a rural tradition. Others, however, applied plein-air techniques to the depiction of city life. The present exhibition contains several works by Jean-François Raffaëlli– a contributor the Impressionist exhibition in 1880 and 1881 – among them the bridge leading from the Louvre Museum to the Academy, the Pont des Arts. In one of the pictures on show – the Farmyard – Raffaëlli continues a pastoral tradition of painting established back in the 1830s; in a second – La Cap Martin – he explores a motif of a single tree against the seascape that owes much to Monet’s painting of the 1890s. In a third, he applies the technique of broken brushwork and brisk execution to the city’s most famous locations, the Quai Malaquais leading towards the Pont des Arts. Paris was (and still is) among the most narcissistic of cities and Impressionists conspicuously documented both the charms – its cafés, restaurants, wide boulevards and famous monuments – and also its vices, poverty, prostitution and loneliness. In this case, the location chosen by Raffaelli would have been well known to the French artistic community. On one side of the river was the Louvre, the home to the annual Salon, the exhibition in which artistic reputations were made and lost; on the other the home of the Académie des beaux-arts, the sworn enemy of many Barbizon painters and guardians of the traditions against which Huet and his contemporaries had railed.

But not all of Barbizon’s followers turned from the country to the city. Some continued to follow in the footsteps of the movement’s founders. As the nineteenth century continued, artists such as Jean-François Chaigneau in France and Carpentier in the Low Countries continued to draw upon the example of the Impressionists, lightening their pallet and painting on light colored grounds but working in an older more romantic tradition. Indeed, as the pace of industrialization quickened throughout Europe, the appeal of a pastoral tradition became more acutely felt. Albert Rigolot’s Washerwomen on the river shows how the tradition of painting peasant life endures well into the last years of the nineteenth century.

This year’s exhibition also offers other insights into French nineteenth century painting. Many members of the Barbizon school came from humble origins. They may have been keen to follow their creative instincts but they also had to be attentive to public taste. Diaz stands out as a highly innovative landscape painter pioneering new compositional techniques – the location of a landscape’s subject at its centre, creative use of light and shade and minute patches of color used as a means of leading the eye through the composition. Diaz, however, was also one of the most commercially astute artists of his age. Rest from the Hunt and Two Bathers on the Water’s Edge on show in the current exhibition both have popular a popular appeal and demonstrate a made class taste for anecdotal sometimes mildly erotic pictures.

Barbizon touched the creative lives of generations of artists. The movement challenged an academic tradition of painting that first established in France in the seventeenth century and in so doing ushered a spirit of naturalism into French art that, in turn, gave rise to the Impressionists. As such, it occupies a central and enduring position in the history of nineteenth French art.  But I want to end on a more intimate note, one that Barbizon’s painters would have approved. A spirit of comradeship bound friends together at the Auberge Ganne as they gathered at the end of the day to eat a rustic meal and recount the adventures of a day’s painting in the forest. It is in this context that we end with a recipe of 1846 said to be a favorite of huntsmen and artists:

*‘Prepare your rabbit, joint it in four. Roast a good handful of lardons in an iron pan until they smoke. Throw in the rabbit and cook until golden. Now cover with white wine and water. Add a handful of topinambours and cook gently for an hour.  Mustard can be added.’ Le livre d’or de la maison Guiche.

Steven Adams, 2011

The Barbizon Movement began as a quiet revolution in French art during the mid-1800s.  Inspired by the wild beauty and uncluttered life of the small French village of Barbizon, artists began to break away from the rigid and classical painting styles of the day.  In an attempt to experiment with a shifting sense of expression, these artists explored unconventional artistic methods and focused on capturing rustic landscapes and peasant life.  The Barbizon artists moved away from calculated formalism and drew inspiration from the bounties of nature and the lives that intersected with the practices of the natural landscape.

The Barbizon Movement began as a call for creativity centered on the simplicity inherit in nature but resulted in producing a powerful trove of influential works of art.  It also gave traction for more well-known artistic movements to follow such as Impressionism.  Scholar Dr. Steven Adams wrote, “Without the efforts of Barbizon painters, the Impressionists and the Post-Impressionists, Matisse and Derain, Picasso and the cubists, and many more would not have devoted themselves to landscape. It is hard to overemphasize the Barbizon School’s importance.”  It is in this spirit of artistic exploration and innovative inspiration that Galerie Michael presents the 2011 Barbizon collection opening on November 11, 2011.

For greater insight into the Barbizon Movement, we have posted below some of the biographies of the artists in the 2011 exhibit.  We hope these brief backgrounds spanning the artists’ careers, works and influences will provide a glimpse into the intricate contributions and depth of the Barbizon Movement.

Evariste Carpentier, 1885, Oil on canvas