BARBIZON REVISITED
AN EXHIBITION OF Barbizon paintings has just left San Francisco’s Palace of the Legion of Honor after a five week stay. It will travel to the museums of Toledo, Cleveland, and Boston before its dispersal sometime next spring. The next such full scale exhibition (the show includes 92 paintings and 21 drawings) will be assembled sometime about the year 2035. At least it has been that long, 73 years, since the last Barbizon exhibition was held, in New York, in 1889.
This observation is not in the nature of complaint about just one more instance of artists too long neglected, paintings overlooked by a callous generation (or three generations) unmindful of their worth, unseeing of their qualities. Rather, it seems fitting that the museums and the public should have turned aside from a school of art, which, in conformity with the taste of an earlier public, was purveyed as the keeper of noble ideals and heroic virtues attached to nature and to notions of peasant morality and the sanctity of the soil. The true sentiment of major artists such as Rousseau and Millet was transformed, in the generation after their deaths, into grossest sentimentality. An accumulation of phony attributes and darkening varnish gradually obscured the strength, clarity and freshness of the original works so that by 1910 or so, when the Barbizon boom on the market began to wane, the paintings and their painters were gladly set to rest. And difficult of resurrection.
Ours is an age of exhumation. (Every forgotten style, each oeuvre must be restored and reinterpreted today for fear that we may have overlooked something good, or perhaps been unfair, and to make sure that the boom doesn’t bust—no Wall Street that Parke-Bernet!) We waited this long, and hardly with bated breath, but the wait was worth it. Miracle and majesty of painting! The exhibition, entitled “Barbizon Revisited,” does not quite merit the term magnificent (we reserve the appellation for Van Gogh exhibitions every two years); it is a bit too low-keyed for that—although it might have seemed more resplendent if more of the paintings had been cleaned for the present tour. But what sheer painting quality! The number of square inches of dextrous, brilliant brushwork, of richly patinaed surface, of subtle tone and color is extraordinary indeed. The painters of Barbizon, given half a chance, have accomplished their own resurrection, and literally by their own hands.
Barbizon is a country village on the edge of the forest of Fontainebleau, about thirty-five miles from Paris. Since early in the nineteenth century the hostelries of Barbizon and neighboring towns sheltered artists who came to paint in the surrounding forests. By about 1830 the popularity of the region increased as a fertile field for landscape motifs and as a retreat from the city for artists who felt the need for a respite from the quickly accelerating pace and industrialization of city life. The name Barbizon came to symbolize a region and a whole school of landscape painting. To a degree, as a school, it participated in the polemics of the time and was early viewed as counter to the officially sanctioned and academic forms of classical landscape, which, derived from the heroic Italianate landscapes of Poussin, had become popular again during the neoclassical revival accompanying the French Revolution and the artistic reign of David. The painters of Barbizon were marginal participants in the Romantic surge of the thirties and forties and were later considered as staunch exemplars of a growing desire for realism.
For the museum-goer who attended the show equipped with a preconceived image of what awaited him, “Barbizon Revisited” may not have seemed quite like old times. This is an exhibition devoted not to Barbizon the village and to the surrounding forest of Fontainebleau, but to the painters whose names have been associated with Barbizon since the mid-nineteenth century: Corot, Daubigny, Diaz, Jules Dupre, Charles Jaque, Millet, Theodore Rousseau, Troyan. Only about one-fourth of the works in the exhibition are of Barbizon and its environs; the remaining three-fourths are the product of a constant search by these artist-naturalists for new regions, for untrammeled corners of nature as nourishment for their art. Millet’s best nature paintings are seascapes done on the coast of his native Normandy; Rousseau’s most familiar paintings prove as often as not to have been done away from Barbizon; Daubigny and Dupre spent practically no time there at all; Corot earned a major reputation without Barbizon paintings counting for a large percentage of his work. Rousseau, who in terms of his pre-eminent position within the group may be considered the father of Barbizon painting, was a restless, inquiring artist, an agonized seeker after nature per se, not simply the plumber of a particular locale. Of his twenty works in the show only four are drawn from the Fontainebleau forest.
All of which is to say that the exhibition was conceived broadly and imaginatively, without arbitrary restriction as to place. By extension, Barbizon means French landscape painting from about 1830 to 1870, and we might include in its scope the painters of the Normandy channel coast such as Boudin (Millet and Troyan were among his early teachers), all the young impressionists, and Courbet. The exhibition would have been enriched by the inclusion of these artists (three paintings by Monet, Pissarro, and Sisley are included in a section called “Barbizon Heritage”), but it would have left less room for the rediscovery of the paintings which have been presented to us.
The exhibition was selected by Professor Robert Herbert of Yale University who also prepared a handsome catalog. Each work in the show is reproduced and accompanied by essential data and annotations, and there is an excellent extended essay by Professor Herbert on the development and nature of Barbizon painting. The catalog is an essential document for any future investigation into this area.
The earliest Corot in the exhibition, The Inn at Montigny-les-Corneilles (c. 1825–31) is a small oil sketch on paper, a close-up view of cottages and rooftops which fills most of the format. The freshness of the palette—the buildings nearly white, the shadows gray, the roofs a cleanly painted sienna—is joined to sharp, angular juxtapositions of form which set out the houses in cubic clarity. An intimate, almost measurable space is created by the interplay of chiseled solids and voids which, as the catalog recognizes, links this small painting to the Cézanne of the seventies and eighties, and to the years of cubist development before 1910. The mature landscapes of Derain may be seen in this light to stem not only from contemporary cubist concerns but also from an art that goes back a hundred years, and more. For Corot did not create this solid study in a vacuum. It reveals his links, through his teachers Michallon and Bertin, to one of the more classicizing landscape painters of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Pierre Henri Valenciennes. Valenciennes was a master of the double life led by so many painters through the first half of the nineteenth century: he could paint both quick sketches and great machine-like landscapes without questioning the standard of values which relegated the sketch to the studio, while the “finished” painting was alone considered fit for public display. Corot did not question this state of affairs either. He, too, divided his work into categories determined by the size of the canvas and the degree of finish.
His larger canvases, designed especially for exhibition at the official Salon, usually reflect his classical instruction. His Silenus of 1838, exhibited at the Salon of that year, is a re-creation of a Bacchic festival set, perhaps, in the forest of Fontainebleau. The figures and the palette used for the costumes—pink, yellow, blue—derive from Poussin (the semi-reclining nude at the left also reflects Ingres’ Grand Odalisque) and remind us once again how much Corot owed to the seventeenth century French master. (His sketch mentioned above is like a detail from a Poussin heroic landscape, isolated and transferred to a humble native locale). But even the somewhat dull and frequently over-worked official canvases may reveal unexpected rewards. In the Silenus, amidst the darkening trees, shadows fall across the ground in strips of turquoise and bluish violet. Corot reveals his awareness of the color of shadows at least twenty-five years before the impressionists claimed the chromatic shadow for their own. It appears again in two other paintings in this exhibition: Woman Seated with Sickle, also from 1838, and Landscape with Cattle of about 1842.
The last two paintings also offer interesting insights into the progeny of Corot. Woman Seated with Sickle, solidly modeled over a seemingly cubic substructure, is the prototype for Derain’s classicizing figures. Landscape with Cattle offers a good example of a landscape in wide horizontal format, viewed from close up, too close to allow for the panoramic effect achieved. A photograph of the motif taken from this vantage point would require a special wide angle lens, and yet in the painting the landscape is not framed, not closed by the traditional disposition of large trees at the edges; rather it seems as if it could extend effortlessly beyond the side borders of the format. This almost paradoxically intimate panorama offers one answer to the challenge of the recently invented instrument of the camera. The camera is limited by the angle of vision subtended by the normal lens; the painter has greater flexibility, he can turn his head, he can adjust his focus to suit his needs. This mode of vision also deviates strongly from the tradition of Renaissance artificial perspective because its assumes the movement of the painter’s head and eyes. In this connection it is interesting to note that the most important developer of this strung-out composition was Manet (in such paintings as the View of the Paris World’s Fair of 1867 or Sur la plage de Boulogne of 1869) whose daring compositional experiments mark one of the most important stages in the breakdown of the perspective vision which had ruled art for almost five hundred years.
Another early Corot in the exhibit, Farm at Recouvrieres, is an unprepossessing yet lovely illustration of the painter’s debt to Dutch seventeenth century landscape. The familiar horse-drawn cart, the laundress by the stream, the farm cottages (handled by Corot with an unfailing eye for clarity of mass even in the most rustic of structures) are all found in Dutch peasant landscapes, but the thatch-roofed houses, the display of farmyard activity recalls still another tradition. A persistent iconography devoted to the picturesque attractions of peasant life had its place in French Romantic art from the time when Hubert Robert inspired Marie Antoinette to have built, in a corner of the gardens of Versailles, Le Hameau, the re-creation of a rustic farm where the Queen and her ladies could play at being fermieres. The vitality of this theme, stemming from a decadent frivolity, is evident in mid-century French landscape. It is the humble cottage genre on which Boudin and the young Monet cut their first teeth. The Barbizon painters kept the tradition alive until the 1870’s when landscape painting forsook nostalgia for a more objective concern with the fleeting present.
A late Corot of 1872, a view of the Coast at Etretat, provides a welcome contrast to the all-too-familiar silvery style of Corot’s last twenty years, so typically and well represented in the exhibition by Souvenir de Mortefontaine. In the Etretat canvas Corot applies his delicacy of palette to the painting of sand and bluish cliffs. It was a motif frequently painted by Boudin, Jongkind, Monet, Whistler and Courbet in the 1860’s in the course of repeated painting campaigns on the Normandy coast. Of these masters, the one to whom Corot comes closest in fragility of sensibility and lightness of palette is, surprisingly enough, Courbet. Faced with the sea and with the example of his younger contemporaries who had been at it consistently for several years, Courbet was forced to raise the values of his colors considerably, mastering quickly with the palette knife a range of color and delicacy of application that outstripped even Whistler. It would seem that the Corot Etretat must relate to the example which Courbet had set him. The composition is extremely close (although reversed) to Courbet’s Cliffs at Etretat (Monet and Dupre had already painted similar compositions as well) but with an added touch that relates this unusual work to Corot’s main compositional concern in his late years, whereby he filtered his landscape through a screen of trees established on the foreground plane close to the surface of the picture. The result is to establish depth by contrast of position, at the same time that the foreground screen parallels and emphasizes the painting’s surface. In Coast at Etretat the handling is more in terms of a traditional repoussoir; the wooden mooring post in the foreground helps to establish depth by contrast of focus while the vertical post joins the flatly painted hill once more to the frontal plane.
Millet has yet to take his deserved place in the history of nineteenth century painting. Certainly the painters who came after him recognized the value of his work. Van Gogh revered him and copied him; Pissarro valued highly Millet’s sense of peasant dignity; Gauguin’s search for the primitive in the peasant society of Brittany was spurred by Millet’s identity of the man of the soil with lasting human values as against the subverted standards of urban life; Monet’s great cliff and sea paintings of the 1880’s derive in part from Millet’s compositional treatment in paintings of the Normandy coast; Seurat was inspired by Millet in his drawings and early paintings.
Several Millet canvases in the exhibition reinforce an awareness of his value to his successors and reveal virtues in his work beyond the usual ones associated with his peasant types. The exhibition includes a good sampling of his figure compositions. The most familiar image is The Sower striding across the earth, a majestic figure who, in his strength, stands for the life of which he is the instrument of creation. The painting is an allegory of life and death; on the horizon a man with a scythe goes about his task. The catalog essay wisely reaffirms the importance of Millet’s classical background and his feeling for the peasant as a foil to social progress, the industrial version of which he despised. Millet’s own words make this explicit; these paintings are not simply lines and shapes distributed knowingly on a surface. And yet, whereas the image is familiar through reproduction, the paintings and the painting quality are not.
The Sower in the exhibition (one of three extant versions) is broadly painted, the subdued colors deployed flatly within large, clearly outlined shapes. The figure is scarcely modeled; each of its parts turned parallel to the picture surface, as are the areas of earth and sky against which the figure is seen. The painting (previously unpublished) is unlike the usual reproduced images of its companion pieces with their weighty darkness emphatic of a peasant romanticism. In fact the exhibited canvas displays, in its flattened, stylized forms, an estheticism akin to that of Puvis de Chavannes’. It seems quite likely that Millet was one of the principal sources for Puvis’ rarefied style. The likelihood of this connection is further illustrated in the exhibition by a version of an equally famous Millet painting, The Gleaners in which the stooping figures of the peasant women are treated in the same simplified flat style, with large areas of pastel color neatly bordered by firm contours.
Professor Herbert includes in the exhibition a small Seurat sketch of 1882 in which two figures bend over their work in the same fashion as in the Millet. Although painted in cross-hatched patches of color the debt to Millet is obvious, as Professor Herbert and others have pointed out in the past; but one is reminded of Seurat’s affinities with Puvis as well. The entire arrangement of severely flattened forms, both figure and landscape, in Seurat’s La Baignade and his Grande Jatte are certainly based in part on Puvis’ mural style. The two later painters were able to discern in Millet’s peasant compositions a broadness of treatment, a classical grandeur of form, which was conducive to their own concerns for refinement, order, and nobility in art. With Seurat, more than with Millet or Puvis, it has been possible to read the forms and minimize the content of his paintings. The links between these three painters, if we start with Seurat and go back, help us to look past the message of Millet’s work and see again the purity of formal conception which underlay his art. The two Millets mentioned join with still a third exhibited work, The Shepherdess (1869–71), to remind us that Millet, an educated classicist, conceived of his paintings more in terms of idyll than of earthly realism.
Several other Millets in the show deserve brief mention for their individual qualities and for their importance for later painters. Another familiar painting, The Man with a Hoe (1859–62) contains a section of distant landscape, with white smoke from several small fires rising diaphanously against the sky. Using delicate harmonies of pink, gray and tan, Millet achieves a lightness of palette that does not appear again until the Sisley of about 1870. On the other hand, in the same work, the rich reddish browns of the hoed field in the foreground are painted in impasto with a strength matched only by the most audacious of the impressionists, Claude Monet (Sisley was certainly the most delicate). A late work, The Birdnesters, a night scene of 1869–74, presents an hallucinatory image of figures groping blindly in the dark, the painting illuminated solely by the burst and crackle of fingers of light which radiate across the surface. The scene is the killing of pigeons, a night time sport in Normandy in which birds are frightened from their perches and stunned by the light of torches held by the hunters. Millet turns the event into a primitive ritual in which man demonstrates his capacity for evil and destruction. The image has a surreal quality, a term which may be applied equally to the Rabbits in the Gorges d’Apremont (1859–60) in which a corner of a forest landscape is mysteriously enlivened as Millet paints a cat’s face darkly on the surface of a rock, giving to an otherwise innocent scene an air of un- or super-reality. Again, one is reminded of Gauguin, who, during his visit to Aries in the fall of 1889, painted a very stylized version of Women in a Garden in which a bush in the lower left hand corner is given physiognomic presence by the inclusion within its contours of the features of a lion. Is this the product of the combined admiration of Gauguin and Van Gogh for the painting of Millet? Millet, as of course we knew all along, but tend to forget because his painted message has been obscured by the moral one, was a highly conscious and many-sided artist. His inheritors, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Seurat, Monet, Pissarro, Puvis de Chavannes, knew it very well indeed.
Theodore Rousseau, of whom we possess a stereotyped image second only to that of Millet, was an artist of great originality around whom the landscape painters of the generation of 1830 rallied. The earliest painting in the exhibition is the Bridge at Moret (1828–29), a picture post card-like view of bridge, houses and water, which may be compared to the Corot painting Inn at Montigny-les-Cormeilles. Both paintings reflect a knowledge of the more private landscape tradition of their predecessors, those quick sketches, usually of Italian sites, which were a standard part of the repertoire of even the most dedicated classical landscapists. Rousseau’s view is undoubtedly the more picturesque of the two—he liked to draw. with the brush and include more of the details of local color of the scene than did Corot—but both paintings reveal a taste for clarity, for the sharp rendering of masses by means of a coherent system of lights and darks. This “cubic” sense may be found in the early work of both painters and of their teachers; in both it was lost, but it was transmitted by painters such as Daubigny and Pissarro to Cézanne, and through him, at the beginning of the next century, to Picasso and Braque.
The most interesting of the early paintings is The Jetty at Granville of 1831, in which the angle of viewing is from above for the foreground roofs and boats, and from head on for the jetty and distant hills of the background. The warped space which results has a pragmatic rather than mathematical basis; it reflects the conformation of data received by the eye and results in a composition of startling originality. This method of combining views particularly in establishing foreground motifs set out against sea and sky, has an important development in the nineteenth century, though in a more complex form, it relates to Dupre’s views of houses or rocks placed to one side of the canvas and juxtaposed with sky and water, two examples of which were in the exhibition. Millet’s views of Greville, his home on the Normandy coast, done as early as 1854, are among the most powerful works in this genre. The sea is usually seen from a high promontory which fills almost half the canvas; distance is telescoped as the residual shapes of sea and sky are linked to the powerful foreground form. This type of composition reappears magnificently in the cliff and sea paintings of Monet done in the 1880’s at Pourville, Etretat and Belle-Ile, and in final form, so to speak, in Seurat’s Le Bee du Hoc, Grandcamp of 1885, in which cliff, water and sea are joined as interlocking shapes in a powerful surface unity. The sense of deep space is completely destroyed as the forms are compressed on to the picture plane itself. What remains is a surface arrangement of mostly curved shapes, a formal idiom which became the main characteristic in the second half of the 1880’s of the work of Seurat, Gauguin and late Van Gogh.
Rousseau forsook radical compositional schemes when he turned to the flatlands of France, presenting nature thereafter in a calmer and more noble stance. The scheme is familiar; large trees stand out on the flat plains (he painted the undergrowth of the forest much less frequently than did Diaz) often disposed in pyramidal formats, as strictly ordered as a Renaissance altarpiece. To a degree, Rousseau’s shift is from painter of views to heroic landscapist, but his view of nature, despite a penchant for careful details of observation, is a romantic one. Of all the French landscapists of the second quarter of the nineteenth century, Rousseau is closest to the great transcendental school of German romanticism, exemplified in landscape by David Caspar Friedrich. Rousseau’s proximity to Friedrich is most evident in his sunsets, his paintings of specific aspects of weather and of light, when nature is most strange, when she exhibits her greatest extremes. But the two differ in that Friedrich sees nature as limitless and empty; he tends to be a painter of the void. Rousseau, on the other hand, concentrates on the solids; he doesn’t paint nature as infinite but makes it conform to human measurement—his trees have an anthropomorphic quality and they are related to human scale.
His favorite time of day was sunset, often deep sunset bordering on night. In treating such paintings he deviates from the influence of the English watercolorists whose works may have affected his early studies. He eschews the thin application of oils, a technique deriving from the translucent quality of watercolor, in favor of a peculiarly opaque handling. By so doing he moves his painting away from the naturalist genre, and stresses the artificiality of color mixed on the palette. In Under the Birches (1842–44) he sets a row of russet-topped trees (with their spindly trunks they seem the progenitors of Monet’s poplars) against an ominously somber sky, ominous because it is too somber for the brightly illuminated landscape. The sky is painted deep blue over a dark gray-green ground. The dark underlayer deprives the area of luminosity; rather, Rousseau creates a density that is the product of the layering of opaque pigments. He is presenting us at least as much with the startling juxtaposition of orange and blue complementaries as with the qualities of nature seen under specific atmospheric conditions. His trees stand totem-like against an unreal ground. Rousseau invested nature with his own feelings, presaging in attitude the notions of Gauguin as to the transformation of nature by emanations from “the mysterious centers of thought.” In varying proportions the representational painting is always an amalgam of objective visual data and subjective interpretation on the part of the artist; but what is involved in the comparison between Rousseau and Gauguin is that in the work of both men we have a devotion to the painting as separate entity, neither the servant of illusionism nor the by-product of some automatic flow from the inner being. The painting is affirmed as having an identity of its own apart from the scene to which it is related and, finally, beyond the individual psychic process. In Rousseau’s work the more extreme the aspect of nature the more synthetic is the painted equivalent. This process is shown again in three other paintings in the exhibit, Sunset in Arbonne (c. 1865), a red and dark landscape, Le Givre (1844–45), a winter landscape, harmony of grays with sunset colors etched into the almost black sky, and Route dans le Foret de Fontainebleau (c. 1860–65), an effect of storm at evening time.
The exhibition includes five other painters, all of whom offer some surprises. The greatest reward, however, is the discovery in Millet and Rousseau of qualities which must inevitably restore them to stature among artists of the first rank. The work of these two painters has a complexity and richness which goes beyond the easily categorizable. In their paintings naturalism often borders on the supernatural, realism in scale and in details of observation combines with romanticism of temperament. We are reminded how terms such as realism and romanticism—the pertinent ones in this connection—though they may reasonably describe a tendency or an entire epoch, rarely suffice for the description of the work of a single man.
The exhibition indicates, moreover, the active role that Barbizon painting played in the latter half of the nineteenth century. It did not simply become absorbed into the new school of Impressionism, but remained alive, as long as the paintings themselves could be seen, to play a role in the larger formation of post-Impressionist tendencies. The exhibition serves one of its most important functions in recalling to us the continuity of art, the incessant action of past art upon each succeeding present.
—Joel Isaacson
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NOTES
The subsequent schedule is: Toledo Museum of Art: November 20–December 27. Cleveland Museum of Art: January 15–February 24. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: March 14–April 28.
