Schiller & Bodo European Paintings is exhibiting MASTERWORKS OF THE BARBIZON SCHOOL, on view through November 27, 2013.  The exhibition features over 30 works from the Barbizon School of Painters, including works by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Jean-Francois Millet, Charles Daubigny, Theodore Rousseau, N. V. Diaz de la Pena, Jules Dupré, Constant Troyon, Charles Jacque, and Gustave Courbet. 

The Barbizon painters were the most influential group of landscape painters in the nineteenth-century. Over the course of the century in France, landscape painting went from being a minor genre, valid only as a setting for major historical or religious themes, to being one of the most predominant genres of European Art.  As of 1800, there was not a landscape painter of significant stature in France, but by 1900 painters of every major school, including the Barbizon School, the Impressionists and the Post-Impressionists, were focusing their artistic output on landscape paintings.  This emergence of the landscape as a significant subject happened primarily thanks to the groundbreaking efforts of the Barbizon painters. 

The exhibition includes three paintings by the first-generation Barbizon painter and supporter of the Impressionists, Charles Daubigny, including his exceptional Jour d’Été of 1871, a quintessential example of the sunlit river scenes that Daubigny painted outdoors from his studio-boat.  It also includes Daubigny’s monumental 1872 Salon submission, Le Tonnelier (The Barrel Maker), depicting daybreak at a barrel maker’s workshop at the edge of Fontainebleau forest.  While most associated with his river landscapes, Daubigny created numerous works about viniculture, including the 1863 The Grape Harvest in Burgundy, now in the Musée du Louvre.  Le Tonnelier is an outstanding example of this genre.

Also featured is Gustave Courbet’s late work Parterre d’Heliotropes (Flowering Heliotropes).  A brilliant landscapist, as well as a painter of social themes and leader of the Realist movement in French painting, Courbet spent the final four years of his life in exile in Switzerland.  In Parterre d’Heliotropes, Courbet explores the kaleidoscopic patterns of the fragrant heliotrope flowers against the jagged, turquoise faces of the Swiss Alps.

Schiller & Bodo European Paintings specializes in 19th-century European paintings, with an emphasis on the French Barbizon, Realist, Academic, and Post-Impressionist traditions.  The exhibition will be on view through November 27th in our private gallery at 120 East 65th Street, New York from Monday to Friday, 11am to 5pm.  For more information, please visit www.schillerandbodo.com or email info@schillerandbodo.com.