SEARCH

19th Century French Painting

Heinrich Liebieg’s estate included thirty two oil paintings and five watercolors of the 19th century French landscape painting. The permanent exhibition presents the works of the Barbizon school and a collection of ten paintings by Eugène Boudin.

The Barbizone School is named after the French town of Barbizon situated fifty kilometers southeast of Paris. In the 1830’s a group of landscape painters settled down here near Fontainebleau Forest, where they strove for new understanding of nature in visual arts. The Barbizon painters were inspired by the English and Dutch landscape paintings; they made forest and forest still-life the subject of their painting. At the beginning of the movement, they started to paint or draw directly in the terrain and finished indoors but later, they produced the whole paintings outdoors. In terms of light, the school wanted to capture natural light relations and oftentimes the painters chose the low horizon line offering the illusion of an identity with what one can see. They aimed at creating the "portrait of landscape” by capturing a natural section of the landscape in various times of the day. This meant a major leap in the development of the French landscape painting towards Realism. By releasing the artist’s pencil and depicting the moods of nature they approached Impressionism. In the Regional Gallery, the Barbizon School is represented by e.g. Charles-Francoise Daubigny, Narcisso Virgilio Díaz de la Peńa, and Théodore Rousseau. The collection of seventeen paintings by Eugène Boudin (1824–1898) in the Gallery’s possession is not only the largest collection of the painter outside of France but also one of the most valuable. Eugène Boudin painted the transformations of the seaside atmosphere in Normandy, Bretagne, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Italy. He is one of the direct predecessors of Impressionism. To him Charles Baudelaire dedicated a long and famous passage in his critique The 1859 Paris Salon: "In his paintings Mr. Boudin captures… prodigious enchantments of air and water… all these clouds in their fantastic and brilliant forms, these chaotic darknesses, these firmaments of black and purple and crumpled, these horizons in mourning or flowing of melted metal, all those depths, all this magnificence went up to my brain as a heady drink…".

The Barbizon school had an enormous impact on the origin of individually different types of landscape painting, it was instrumental in introducing the Austrian and Hungarian "Mood Impressionism", and influenced hugely the Czech landscape painting, especially Antonín Chitussi and Wilhelm Riedl, and partially also Karel Purkyně, Soběslav Pinkasm and Václav Brožík.