Newsletter Vol. 3

NEWSLETTER
Barbizon: Journey to Impressionism

NOEL, Jules Achille (1815-1881)

L'arrivee a Honnebon

Oil on canvas 15 x 21 1/2 inches

910215

It seems most fitting that the first exhibition to be held in our new Salon, (Located at 260 North Rodeo Dr) be our highly anticipated 19^th Century Barbizon School Weekend, Friday November 20th and Saturday November 21st. These pioneering plein air masters were not only the fore-bearers of Impressionism but are acknowledged as the Artists who began the journey to modern art by breaking free from the salon restrictions and academic controls, ultimately changing the coarse of art history as they new it.

In our ongoing quest and commitment to present and offer the finest works available, we have searched the world over and discovered many important works of art which will be unveiled during this extraordinary exhibition.

Additionally, we are delighted to announce the return of the world renowned scholar and lecturer Dr. Steven Adams, Professor at The University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield UK, and lecturer at the Victoria and Albert Museum and National Gallery in London. Dr. Adams will be giving an in depth, informative lecture on the new Barbizon collection. The lecture will present comprehensive insight into the seminal evolution of “Plein Aire”, Nineteenth Century painting in Barbizon. Dr. Steven Adams is also the author of “The Barbizon School & the Origins of Impressionism” one of the most important books on the Barbizon school.

The Barbizon Weekend will include the following events:

Friday November 20th

6:30 pm Exhibition Opening at Galerie Michael's New Space:

260 North Rodeo Drive

Saturday, November 21st
12:00pm Brunch at Galerie Michael and the Annex
12:45 pm Dr. Steven Adams Guest Lecture

2:30/3:00pm LACMA Tour- contact your consultant for details and to RSVP

* other events to be planned.

An Introduction to Barbizon

The group of French who joined together in the village of Barbizon, in the forest of Fontainbleau, during the mid-nineteenth century sparked a quiet rebellion by taking painting out doors or En Plein Air. They broke with classic tradition by establishing landscape painting as an independent movement, opening the way toward Impressionism.

As men of the Barbizon School they despised the growth of industrialization and urban expansion. United in their constant opposition to the city and modern life, stylistically, they were the first to narrow the gap that had traditionally existed between the direct sketch (left Millet, La Laitiere Normande, Charcol on paper, 401722) and the finished studio picture. In the larger scope of art history, the Men of 1830, Charles Francois, Jules Dupre, Charles Jacque, Contant Troyon, Henri Harpignies, and later Leon L’Hermitte, Jean Charles Cazin, Julien Dupre and Jean Monchablon are the bridge between Romanticism and the development of early Modern painting.

Paintbrush in hand, their singular mission was the honest depiction of the rural landscape and its inhabitants. They truly worshiped the land around them and held it sacred in a literal sense. Theodore Rousseau, founding father of the plein-air movement, stated the intense spirituality with which they were approaching their work:

"Our art is truly capable of achieving the expressive force we are seeking.

Through the sincerity of your portrayal and exact truth to life; observe nature with
all the religion of your heart. In so you will end up dreaming of the life of the infinite.
Do not copy what you see with mathematical precision, instead feel and convey the
real world which enfolds you in all its inevitability."

Along with this new appreciation of the natural world came a reappraisal of the simple people who made it their home. Until the nineteenth century the peasant in the realm of fine art was largely ignored. They were considered too crude and lowly to warrant representation. The industrial revolution changed all that. Though the efforts of Gustave Courbet, Jean Francois Millet and Jules Breton, the life of the peasant was celebrated, given dignity and nobility (shown right Galien-Laloue, Eugene, Paysanne en bord de Riviere, Oil on canvas 907760). In a new world where railroads and factories were erasing centuries of tradition with unnerving speed, the peasant became a cherished reminder of a simpler past.

This group of exceptional artists were celebrated on both sides of the Atlantic in their day. After many years of neglect, they have at last been re-discovered. Museums have identified pre-Impressionist paintings as one of the few remaining, important movements of the nineteenth century for serious study and expansion of their collections. The current marketplace, confronted with the reality of a rapidly diminishing supply of Impressionist and Modern works, similarly has turned its attention to Barbizon painting with great enthusiasm.

Michael Schwartz, President of Galerie Michael

An Introduction to Barbizon Artists

MORGAN, Frederick, 1856-1927

Frieriet (The Proposal)

Oil on canvas. 50 3/8 x 33 1/8 ”

#402017

Frederick Morgan was a British artist who studied in the studio of the eminent French history painter Thomas Couture, Manet’s teacher and one of the most prominent history painters of the mid nineteenth century. Like many foreign painters who gravitated to Paris, Morgan was heavily influenced by the popular genre of peasant painting. Images of the countryside were once considered highly suspect. In the late nineteenth century, however, representations of rural life began to loose their radical edge. Increasingly, winsome pictures of the countryside and its unchanging traditions offered reassurance and served as a palliative to the various political uprisings that punctuated the nineteenth century. Similarly, as the Industrial Revolution raged in England, a fondness for the unchanging traditions of the countryside and its inhabitants grew.

In this picture, Morgan, shows rural life with a simple charm. The peasant girl is momentarily distracted by her suitor. Like many British painters of the period, Morgan gives his work and anecdotal twist. The girl sports a flower in her chemise, given to her, we assume, by her suitor; her fingers are entwined with his and to the lower right of the picture, a vine also appears to have designs on her body. The English writer John Ruskin insisted on the importance of the accurate representation of nature and of art’s moralizing role. Morgan’s painting rises to Ruskin’s challenge magnificently. Every part of the composition is shown in minute detail. As the girl seems to weigh her response to her suitor in the balance, the mood of the picture is enhanced by the soft evening light. Morgan’s paintings were enormously popular in England where he showed regularly at the Royal Academy Exhibitions. Paintings of peasants come in a variety of forms and Morgan’s quintessentially British response to the genre is a wonderful riposte to the work of his French contemporaries.

BILLET, Pierre (1837-1922), and BRETON, Jules (1827-1906), 1827-1906

La rammasseuse de bois

Oil on canvas. 60 ½ x 41 ¾ ”

909820

Jules Breton was one of the most prominent peasant painters in the second half of the nineteenth century. First trained in St.-Omer in Normandy, he later studied in Ghent in Belgium, returning to Paris to study at the Ecole des beaux-arts in 1847. Like many artists of the period, he was influenced by the workers uprising of 1848 and turned his hand to representations of peasant life. Breton’s subjects are often humble. Here, to the left, we see a peasant girl collecting scraps of firewood, an ancient right given to the French peasantry. Although Breton often shows the poorest of the poor in his pictures, he confers his subjects with great dignity. The peasant girl we see here is healthy and robust and, according to one art critic, takes on the appearance of one of Michelangelo’s monumental Sybils in the Sistine Chapel. Not least Breton takes the brave step of painting the peasant girl near to life size. Paintings of peasants were common throughout the nineteenth century but they are often shown on a small scale (pictured left Diaz de la Pena Interieur de Foret, Oil on canvas, 909577). Much less common is the depiction of a humble subject on such an heroic scale.

The later nineteenth century saw the gradual demise of a conservative prejudice that insisted that respectable art should appeal to an intellectual elite and that the most dignified painting was the depiction of heroes from classical literature. Breton did much to overturn this prejudice. A favorite of Parisian audiences, Breton showed regularly in the annual Salon. He also received lucrative commission from the French government. Pictures such as the one shown here (above) were especially popular both in France and the United States. Van Gogh admired Breton’s work and was reputed to have walked 80 miles to visit his studio and there is much in the robust representation of peasants the Dutch artist owes to Breton.

By the end of the century, Breton was one of the most important painters in France. A member of the French Academy, he was awarded the Legion d’honneur and became a member of the Royal Academy in London. We see him here collaborating with another French painter of rural life, his student, Pierre Billet (left BILLET, Pierre and BRETON, Jules, La Rammasseuse de bois, Oil on canvas, 909820). Painters of Breton’s stature were often hard pressed to meet the demands for their pictures and it was not uncommon that students would be contracted to assist in finishing paintings. One critic writing at the end of the nineteenth century insisted that “Breton’s pictures were an essential ornament to any collection of French art…”

VEYRASSAT, Jules Jacques, 1828-1893

La pose sur le chemin de halage

oil on wooden panel 9 1/2 x 13 3/4 inches

910213

French landscape painting, not without reason, is often feted as a highly innovative genre. The members of the Barbizon School pioneered new forms of landscape painting and went on to inspire the Impressionist circle. In each case, their work was often met with surprise and derision by a conservative art establishment weaned on history painting, stage-managed paintings that took their subjects from classical literature. Landscape painting was one of the France’s most prominent achievements and such was the impact of the Barbizon and Impressionist painters that their works continued to exert their influence well into the last quarter of the nineteenth century. In this magnificently sensitive work by the French artists Veyrassat, we can detect the influence of Barbizon and Impressionist painting long after the first wave of landscape painters had made their mark. Gone is the desire to shock but the sensitive approach to the fleeting effects of light and the charms of nature remain. Here, Veyrassat shows a canal-side scene and a troupe of horses sheltering under the midday sun. Industrial canal networks such as the one shown here were vital to France’s industrial success. In this instance, the painter calls attention to the scene’s picturesque qualities, the intense red on the horses’ halters, the delicate light on their hindquarters, and flecks on pigment in the shimmering trees. Veyrassat and his contemporaries continued to charm Parisian collectors well into the twentieth century who praised their work for their ‘fini’, the careful attention to detail. Veyrassat’s works are included in public collections throughout France and the United States; the Musée du Louvre in Paris has several examples of his work.

CHAIGNEAU, Jean Ferndinand, 1879-1938

La nuit étoilée à Barbizon (The Starry Night in Barbizon)

Oil on canvas. 46 x 35 ”

Signed lower left. Dedicated to Emile Zola on back lower stretcher bar.

910210

Exhibited at L'Association Franco-Américaine de Peinture et de Sculpture, a society for the promotion of French art in the United States and American art in France, Chaigneau’s painting owes much to Millet’s picture of two peasants pausing at prayer, the famous Angelus of 1857-9. Millet’s painting was commissioned originally by a wealthy American collector, one Thomas G. Appleton. The painting was enormously popular in the United StatesBarbizon painter’s reputation. Chaigneau’s picture is a rare example of a French landscape painting showing a nighttime view. It shows a shepherdess in the act of prayer, her sheep, the starry firmament, and in the background the village of Barbizon, home to some of France’s most prominent painters. By the time Chaigneau painted the picture, Barbizon and its surrounding landscape were well known to art lovers in France, the rest of Europe and the United States. Artists and tourists alike visited the small country village and moonlight walks through the surrounding countryside are recorded in many guides to the region. It is this tradition Chaigneau calls upon in this work.

Chaigneau’s painting is also a reminder that the essence of France was to be found in both in the soil and in her traditional devotion to the Catholic church, and paintings of these subjects graced the Paris Salon throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. American audiences found Chaigneau’s work especially appealing. The highest kind of art, the correspondent for the New York Times wrote in 1890, was religious art, not the institutional religious art of old Europe with is saints and virgins but an art that reflects homespun independence, dignity in labor and a veneration of rural life, values that resonated with American sensibilities. Chaigneau’s landscape is exceptional not least because it was dedicated to the French art critic Emile Zola. Throughout his career, Zola championed the cause of artists of independent spirit – not least Manet and members of the Impressionist circle - and was a keen art collector. In Chaigneau’s painting we see the durability of the Barbizon tradition, a tradition recognized abroad and, not least, by one of France’s greatest art critics.

Narcisse Virgile Diaz de la Pena

Jeune Paysanne en costume italien

Signed lower right: N Diaz

Oil on paper mounted on panel

12 x 9 1/8 inches (30.5 x 23 cm)

(Not yet inventoried)

We know Diaz de la Pena primarily as a landscape painter. He was one of the first members of the Barbizon School to take up residence in the small village on the edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau. Diaz was a remarkably versatile painter able to turn his hand not only to landscapes like the one to the left (Faggot Gathering in the Forest, oil on canvas, 908005) but also to still life (below Fluers, oil on cancas, 910216) and in this instance popular genre painting. Here Diaz shows a young Italian peasant girl in traditional costume, reflecting on a flower in her left hand. Pictures such as these were enormously popular with the middle class Parisian art lovers who dominated the market for smaller pictures in the mid nineteenth century. Paris was a busy and sophisticated city and pictures of rural life and its inhabitants offered them the opportunity for fantasy and escape. Although many artists turned their hand to genre painting, Diaz shows himself as a particularly accomplished exponent, the contrasting blues and burning reds of the peasant girl’s costume are reminiscent of romantic artists’ concern with expressive potential of dramatic color. But Diaz is no less a draftsman. Trained as a porcelain painter in the early part of his career, Diaz renders the girls hands with perfect confidence, drawing on a wide range of painting techniques, some patient and painstaking, others remarkable for their bravura. It is little wonder the Renoir, also trained, as a humble porcelain painter as a young man, was so beguiled with the paintings of Diaz.

*Special thanks to Dr. Steven Adams (renowned Barbizon scholar, lecturer, and professor), Michael Schwartz (owner and president of Galerie Michael) and Robert Avellano (Fine Art Consultant).

Make the Barbizon Weekend a family trip as well, located right in front of Galeire Michael the Beverly Hills Annual Lighting Ceremony will take place on November 21st at the 2 Rodeo Complex. The times and events are listed below:

3:00 pm - Family friendly live entertainment kicks-off throughout the golden triangle with Santa & Mrs. Claus available for photos at Two Rodeo.
7:00 pm - Lighting Ceremony with fireworks and music from Beverly Hills High School's own Madrigals
7:30 pm - Winter Wonderland after party at Two Rodeo with participating boutiques serving holiday treats, a lively and festive holiday steel drum band, and snow falling over the Via Rodeo