Barbizon School vs Impressionism
バルビゾン派 / 印象主義
Barbizon School comes from Landscape Painting and Impressionism from Painting Techniques. They are reached for with some of the same intent, which is where they get confused.
Barbizon School
French landscape painting built from direct observation around Fontainebleau, treating trees, marsh, fields, livestock, weather, and labor as the subject rather than the background to a historical story.
Impressionism
A movement that went outdoors and caught light itself with rapid strokes. It abandoned the contour line, laid shadows in complementary colors rather than black, and painted the same subject differently at each hour of the day. Nearly every avant-garde that followed defined itself by agreeing or disagreeing with it.
| Barbizon School | Impressionism | |
|---|---|---|
| Era | 1830s–1870s | 1860s–1880s |
| Family | Landscape Painting | Painting Techniques |
| Kind | Style | Style |
| Cues | Low horizon under a changing sky / Trees, marsh, livestock, and rural labor / Restrained brown, green, and grey earth colors / The directness of outdoor studies joined to substantial studio paint | Short, divided touches of paint / Shadows made without black / Natural light outdoors / Composition that catches an instant |
| Best used for | Showing countryside and forest as places of weather and labor rather than pastoral fantasy · Giving environmental work a quiet attention to soil, near distance, and changing sky | Building an image whose subject is light and the passage of time · Raising form from adjacent colors instead of contour |
| Type | Use a plain serif for place and season, keeping large copy out of the landscape. | Keep the lightness of the hand and do not tighten the page with a rigid face. |
| Composition | Lower the horizon, weight one side with a trunk or animal, and give most of the field to weather. | Move off center and let the edge of the frame cut the subject. |
| Material | Layer ochre, umber, olive, and lead grey wetly, then place white light only in a few areas. | Set unmixed colors side by side and leave white ground to make the light. |
| Caution | A beige country scene is not automatically Barbizon. Observe a specific site, weather, and form of work, and do not break color as far as Impressionism. | Imitating the brushwork alone produces nothing but blur. The real decision is which color goes into the shadow. |