Landscapes with Elegant Figures Promenading in Parkland Settings
by French School
Material
Oil on canvas, dimensions variable; 227.50 × 132.80 × 2.70 cm
Dating
app. 1800
About the artists
The school of Barbizon is an important name in the context of French painting of the 19th century. The school was named after the village of Barbizon on the margins of the forest in Fontainebleau, where after 1830 a group or artists from Paris met for a summer school once a year. This group never formed a coherent movement. The painters neither aimed for uniform aesthetics, nor were they interested in strict school structures. What united them was rather the rejection of academic teaching in favour of an immediate access to nature. In line with this ideology, these artists began to pay attention to motifs that had before been considered unworthy of artistic representation – swamps, the outskirts of the woods, streams and rustic estates. The characteristic atmosphere, the special light and the individual enchantment of these unprivileged sites came to the fore. Therein the realistic depiction of nature began to show as a characteristic style of the Barbizon school.