The Barbizon School and the Origins of Impressionism

Description

The key painters associated with the Barbizon School – Corot, Millet, Rousseau and Courbet – are among the finest landscape artists of the nineteenth century. From their base at the village of Barbizon in the Forest of Fontainebleau, just outside Paris, they painted nature as they saw it, anticipating many of the techniques and effects of Impressionism. In this survey Steven Adams re-evaluates French landscape painting in the half-century before Impressionism, placing this ‘return to nature’ against the background of the rapid industrialization and political crises of the period.Steven Adams teaches at the School of Art and Design at the University of Hertfordshire and lectures at the Victoria & Albert Museum and National Gallery in London.

‘Every library and anyone interested in mid-nineteenth-century French cultural life should get it.’ (Observer)

‘A superb investigation of a long-overshadowed subject. Recommended for all collections.’ (Library Journal)