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French Artists Village at Barbizon Jean Francois Millet
French Artists Village at Barbizon Jean Francois Millet
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Kindle version of vintage magazine article originally published in 1902. Contains lots of great info and illustrations seldom seen in the last 110 years.
Read excerpt -
There in Barbizon, for the most part, they lived frugal lives, all of them men of the people, close to the soil, rejecting each in his own way the standards of art that were set up in Paris. For that reason they were excluded from the Salon as Goths and barbarians. And yet their work, rejected by the dealers and their clients, spoke a language that some critics understood, that some buyers, and among them chiefly Americans, appreciated. It is a common complaint that Americans have encouraged French art in its shallowest forms of bogus sentiment, realism, and the imitation of Italian masters of old; but at least it should be recalled that men like Millet, Barye, Rousseau, Dupre, Corot, Jules Breton, and Diaz found men froth beyond the Atlantic ready to welcome a departure from the fashionable lines.
At the time when Barbizon was pleasantest these landscapists had begun to receive recognition; their hardships in finance were past and the young paint¬ers had already divided into camps for and against their work. The fine inn at Barbizon had not been built, however, and the meeting place was at the older building on the outskirts of the straggling little village. Thither Millet would come, modest and quiet, along with Diaz the noisy, and occasionally with Rousseau, uncertain of mood and temper.
I would like to take you into the old inn on a certain day in the sixties, and show you the long table in the room of the kitchen at which no one might sit unless the artists bade him welcome as a special guest. Good French cheer and a peasant simplicity marked this table. On a certain day, had you stood at the door leading from the room where ordinary guests were entertained, you would have heard a terrible rumpus all of a sudden, and a chorus of out¬raged voices:
"Ah, les barbares!"
The young American artist with a hatchet face and a mop of light hair, clad in a peasant's blouse, who sat at the end of the long table, had but a moment before snorted audibly above the clatter of knives and forks and the babel of talk. His voice suggested neither sugar nor cream as he threw down the spoon with which he had hoped to eat strawberries that did not come, strawberries that would not come now, because, to use the quaint French idiom, they were "all."
Read excerpt -
There in Barbizon, for the most part, they lived frugal lives, all of them men of the people, close to the soil, rejecting each in his own way the standards of art that were set up in Paris. For that reason they were excluded from the Salon as Goths and barbarians. And yet their work, rejected by the dealers and their clients, spoke a language that some critics understood, that some buyers, and among them chiefly Americans, appreciated. It is a common complaint that Americans have encouraged French art in its shallowest forms of bogus sentiment, realism, and the imitation of Italian masters of old; but at least it should be recalled that men like Millet, Barye, Rousseau, Dupre, Corot, Jules Breton, and Diaz found men froth beyond the Atlantic ready to welcome a departure from the fashionable lines.
At the time when Barbizon was pleasantest these landscapists had begun to receive recognition; their hardships in finance were past and the young paint¬ers had already divided into camps for and against their work. The fine inn at Barbizon had not been built, however, and the meeting place was at the older building on the outskirts of the straggling little village. Thither Millet would come, modest and quiet, along with Diaz the noisy, and occasionally with Rousseau, uncertain of mood and temper.
I would like to take you into the old inn on a certain day in the sixties, and show you the long table in the room of the kitchen at which no one might sit unless the artists bade him welcome as a special guest. Good French cheer and a peasant simplicity marked this table. On a certain day, had you stood at the door leading from the room where ordinary guests were entertained, you would have heard a terrible rumpus all of a sudden, and a chorus of out¬raged voices:
"Ah, les barbares!"
The young American artist with a hatchet face and a mop of light hair, clad in a peasant's blouse, who sat at the end of the long table, had but a moment before snorted audibly above the clatter of knives and forks and the babel of talk. His voice suggested neither sugar nor cream as he threw down the spoon with which he had hoped to eat strawberries that did not come, strawberries that would not come now, because, to use the quaint French idiom, they were "all."
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