Art: The Voices of the Trees

The last major show anywhere in the world of the French landscapists known as the Barbizon school took place in Manhattan in 1889—and shortly after that came the deluge. Successive waves of impressionism, cubism, and finally abstractionism swept them from museum walls and sent their prices sinking in the auction houses. What had been considered fresh and vigorous, later generations found sentimental and dull. But lately the Barbizon school has been undergoing another re-evaluation—upward. Currently on a tour of U.S. museums is the biggest Barbizon exhibition—113 paintings—since that Manhattan show 73 years ago (see color).

Thomas Howe, director of San Francisco’s Palace of the Legion of Honor, is the man behind the Barbizon tour. With impressionist and post-impressionist art priced high, Howe noted a few years ago that collectors were ready to take another look at work that had fallen out of favor. “The feathery things are coming back,” he said. “Privately, the big dealers are buying them up and salting them away.” He looked over his own museum’s Barbizon collection, decided that by adding paintings from local collectors (including Millet’s once famous Man with a Hoe), he would have a strong start toward a major show. Howe took his idea to Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, which also had a sizable Barbizon collection. Before long he had an imposing list of honorary sponsors, including French Culture Minister Andre Malraux and Sir Philip Hendy, director of London’s National Gallery. Last week, after a stay in San Francisco, the Barbizon show was on view at the Toledo Museum of Art. Next stops: Cleveland in January and Boston in March.

Back to Nature. The catalogue for the show, by Yale Professor Robert L. Herbert, is an event in itself, the first serious study written about the school since 1925. It positions the painters, most of whom had their studios in the village of Barbizon near Paris, as genuine revolutionaries. For generations, French landscapists had not painted direct from nature except to make sketches. Their finished pictures were done in the studio—usually hoked-up historical scenes or “noble landscapes” that over the years had become more and more stagy and contrived. The elementary idea that an artist could set up his easel out of doors and produce a serious painting was new and radical in early 19th century France. “Barbizon artists,” writes Herbert, “were the first to narrow the gap that had traditionally existed between the direct sketch and the finished studio picture.”

Drawing inspiration from British and Dutch landscapists. the Barbizon painters saw that a landscape did not have to be either historical or “noble.” It could be an everyday scene, painted direct. The French revolutions of 1830 and 1848 aided the movement, stirring a pervasive tradition-breaking spirit that weakened the authority of the academicians.

Floating Studio. The oldest member of the new school was Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, who began painting landscapes-out of doors in 1822, when he was 26. A rover who toted his easel all over France, Italy and the Low Countries, he captured farmhouses, fishing villages, animals and people in muted colors of luminous clarity. He had a sense of structure that both Seurat and Cezanne admired, but he was more interested in the surface of nature than in its interior turbulence. His quiet scenes were sometimes a bit melancholy, sometimes vibrant with a profound joy.

Corot’s friend Charles Daubigny bought a boat and used it as a floating studio. He painted scenes along the coasts of France and Holland with brush strokes that became increasingly liquid, in keeping with his subjects. Critics accused him of hastening too much over solid detail, surrendering too much to vague “impressions.” Writes Professor Herbert: “It was in this dispute, which revolved around his diminishing the difference between sketch and finished painting, that the battle for impressionism was first engaged.”

Turmoil & Calm. The Barbizon artist most misunderstood in later years was Jean François Millet, whose studies of peasants, notably The Angelus and The Man with a Hoe, splashed him with a reputation for sentimentality. Millet himself protested that he could not understand how anybody could consider the French peasant “jolly,” and today, seen afresh, the paintings justify his protests. He painted his peasants with brooding compassion, saw in them “true humanity, the great poetry,” but the mood is somber rather than sentimental. They bend to their labors patiently but also hopelessly, condemned to struggle against stubborn nature day after day with hoe and pick and ax.

Though 16 years younger than Corot, Theodore Rousseau was in his lifetime the dominant figure in the school. He was obsessed by the moods of nature, from the wild turmoil of storms to the glassy calm of scenes like his Farm on the Banks of the Oise. To those who have dismissed the Barbizon painters as little more than copyists of nature, Rousseau gave an arresting reply. To paint from nature, he said, was not to copy it but to converse with it, to paint objects in terms of “the echoes they have placed in our souls.” He had “heard the voices of the trees,” he said. “I wanted to talk with them and to be able to tell myself by this other language—painting—that I had put my finger on the secret of their majesty.”