Barbizon School

The Wood Sawyers is one of French painter Jean François Millet's paintings ennobling the hard labour of rural life. Millet saw the dignity of the peasant, though he gave a rather static view of an ordered society that was later appreciated by the French and American industrialists who began to buy his paintings.

French school of landscape painters of the mid-19th century, based at Barbizon in the forest of Fontainebleau. They aimed to paint fresh, realistic scenes, sketching and painting their subjects in the open air. Members included Jean François Millet, Théodore Rousseau, and Charles Daubigny.

Friendship and poverty brought the Barbizon painters together and first prompted their ‘return to nature’. They were not, however, merely romantic exiles from the city but realistic students of landscape, and in this respect were the forerunners of the Impressionists. Daubigny, in his practice of plein-air painting, approached nearest to Impressionism. By the middle of the 19th century the village, through the prestige of its original settlers, had become a much-patronized resort of artists.

The attitude of the painters seems to have been influenced by John Constable and other English landscapists, though Rousseau, a leader of the group, was strongly influenced by the Dutch. Rousseau, Diaz de la Peña, Jules Dupré, and Daubigny formed the nucleus of the school, and Camille Corot and Millet became associated with them, though Barbizon represents only a part of Corot's career, and Millet is distinct from the rest in the emotional significance he sought to attach to the life of the peasant. Among other Barbizon painters were Constant Troyon, Henri Harpignies, Antoine Chintreuil, and Charles Émile Jacque.