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Of those artists who cherished and cultivated these myths, none were so important as the members of the Barbizon school. This name refers to a little village in the middle of the Fontainebleau forest, easily accessible from Paris. There, beginning in the 1830s, landscape painters would temporarily escape from urban realities and commune with a pre-industrial world of woods, cottages, and shepherdesses. Geographically speaking, Barbizon was only a symbol, since many of these artists traveled far and wide in France to savor variations on this local theme. But the meditative, hushed mood of almost religious respect for an unspoiled countryside remained persistent, whether experienced in the Ile de France or the Jura.
The mood is perfectly captured in a forest idyll by the most prominent member of the school, Theodore Rousseau, who showed this painting at the Salon of 1849. It was the year after a revolution that covered the streets of Paris with civilian blood and that prompted other artists of rural life, such as Millet and Courbet, to paint more heroic and threatening images of contemporary peasants and landowners. We are set down here in a secluded, peaceful haven in the forest of l'Isle Adam, in spirit light years away from Paris though only some twenty miles north of it. In place of the axial boulevards of Paris, we find an irregular avenue of trees that provide a sanctuary of shelter and contemplation in the midst of this benevolent density of bark, leaf, and cooling shade. Time, even work, seems to have stopped as we glimpse through what seems like a distant lens a tiny vignette of a peasant girl seated among cattle that will graze forever. The diminutive scale of the figures, human and bovine, contribute to this mythic evocation of primitive, agrarian peace.
Such pictorial fictions could register as transparently false, were it not for the fact that Rousseau, like the best of the Barbizon group, believed them. With a passionate, on-the-spot intensity that rings true, he attempted to record these vestiges of an endangered, ancient way of life. The unruly profusion of nature, with its thick brambles, tangled leaves, and speckles of light, is presented not as an artificial formula in the Rococo manner, but in loving detail, as if the artist wanted to immerse himself in a primordial landscape remote from the hand of man. The range of perceptions is remarkable, alternating between the chaotic congestion of the underbrush in the foreground and the liberating vista of dappled sunlight that can lead us to the remote horizon. The authenticity of these landscape observations as something particular, animated, and vibrant already approaches the vision of Monet.
Other Barbizon painters could vary this kind of experience in a multitude of ways, as might be seen in two canvases exhibited at the 1855 Exposition Universelle. In one of them, Le Roux's vivid record of the mottled russet profusion of a stand of cherry trees and birches in autumn, Rousseau's intense perceptions are further refined. In another Troyon's fantasy of a herd of cattle marching to work across a sunlit plain, directed by a generically noble peasant who might be leading French troops to war Rousseau's quiet veneration of man and beast is expanded in both size and rhetoric. This huge canvas, without a trace of sweat, flies, or manure, translates the personal visions of the Barbizon school into the bombastic language of a patriotic hymn to the glory of French agriculture.
- From Robert Rosenblum, "Paintings in the Musee D'orsay"
(1812-1867)
Few farmers or peasants would recognize rural life as it was depicted in the bountiful harvest of nineteenth-century paintings made by and for city dwellers. The image of pastoral harmony - one of the most deeply rooted in Western culture - was propagated as never before at a time when new forms of grueling factory work began to replace the traditional labors of the fields, and when starving populations from the country invaded cities in the hope of finding jobs and surviving. From a Parisian's point of view, the green land beyond, with its unpolluted forests, its farms and grazing cattle, its tilled fields, could come to represent a vanishing Arcadia.
Further reading on Theodore Rousseau:
Theodore Rousseau Images
c. 1850-52
Oak Trees in the Gorge of Apremont
1854
The Edge of the Woods at Monts-Girard, Fontainebleau Forest
c. 1857-64
The Village of Becquigny
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