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Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot was born in Paris in 1796; he died in Paris in 1875, the year after the First Impressionist Exhibition. The freedom and sensitivity with which he responded to the changing moods of landscape put him at the forefront of the plein-air artists of the Barbizon School, and make him perhaps the most important precursor of Impressionism. Corot's leaves dance in the canvas before your eyes, caught in an ever-changing light. The clearest path from Corot to Impressionism can be seen in the work of Camille Pissarro. Pissarro listed himself as Corot's pupil in the catalogues to the Paris Salons of 1864 and 1865. One of the four radical young artists who teamed up at the Acad�mie Suisse in 1859 - Pissarro, Claude Monet, Armand Guillaumin, Paul C�zanne - Camille Pissarro was the only artist to participate in all eight Impressionist exhibitions in Paris. Just as Corot had been free with his help, advice, and encouragement to the young Pissarro, and to Eug�ne Boudin

Hello everyone. I'm not intending to revive this blog, as I simply don't have the time, but I have found a few posts that are so nearly complete that it seems a shame not to post them. So here's an addition to the posts I made about Barbizon artists quite a while back. The Jacque brothers, Charles �mile and L�on, are minor figures in the Barbizon School compared to Corot, Millet, Rousseau, and Daubigny, but their art has an honesty and charm that still keeps it alive today. Charles �mile Jacque was born in Paris in 1813, and died there in 1894. The younger brother L�on Jacque was born in 1828, and surprisingly his date of death appears to be unknown. I haven't come across any work by L�on Jacque after 1872, so I would hazard a guess at a death in the early 1870s. The whole Jacque family seem to have been artistically gifted; there are also Charles Jacque's sons �mile, Fr�d�ric, and Maurice, and a Marcel Jacque who seems to be some kind of relation. L�opold Massard,

Paul Huet was born in Paris in 1803. was a pupil of Antoine-Jean Gros and Pierre-Narcisse Gu�rin, and a friend and associate of Delacroix and Bonington. He was inspired like other Barbizon School artists by the art of John Constable (exhibited in Paris in 1824). While Huet's oils are sedate and conservative, his watercolours have a freshness that really sings; if he had been a Post-Impressionist rather than a Pre-Impressionist, he would no doubt have applied the vibrant colour sense shown in his watercolours to his oils. The Impressionists  shunned brown and black; if Huet had done the same, his work would have been transformed. There's a good brief biography with selections of his art here . Paul Huet, Vieilles maisons sur le port de Honfleur Etching, 1866 Alongside his paintings and watercolours, Paul Huet was also a printmaker. He published his first lithographs in 1829 and his first etchings in 1834. He died in 1869, and both my examples of his etched work date from his las

Charles-Fran�ois Daubigny was born in Paris in 1817. One of the leading artists of the Barbizon School, Daubigny is a significant fore-runner of Impressionism. Because of the impressionistic nature of his oils, which seemed unfinished to the tastemakers of the day, his works were criticized as "rough sketches". Charles Chaplin, Daubigny Etching, 1862 B�raldi 3 Daubigny was a very active printmaker, creating 127 etchings, aquatints, and drypoints, 18 clich�s-verre, and 4 lithographs. I have six of his etchings to share with you. Charles-Fran�ois Daubigny, Le marais Etching, 1851 Delteil/Melot 84 The earliest etching I have by Daubigny is Le marais, dating from 1851 though my copy is from the 1874 printing for the Gazette des Beaux-Arts. Although this is already no. 84 in the catalogue raisonn� of Daubigny's etchings, it is actually right at the beginning of his true career as an original etcher, many of the earlier works being illustrative plates of little significance. I

I intend this post to be first in a short series about the important fore-runners or precursors of Impressionism. Although the first Impressionist exhibition of 1874 is regarded as an earthquake moment in the history of art, there had been plenty of warning tremors in the years leading up to it. The roots of Impressionism lie most obviously in the plein-art painters and printmakers of the Barbizon School, and I shall in due course be looking at Barbizon artists such as Camille Corot, Charles-Fran�ois Daubigny, Charles-�mile Jacque, Jean-Fran�ois Millet, and Th�odore Rousseau. The Barbizon artists were inspired by the example of the English painter John Constable, just as the Impressionists were inspired by J. M. W. Turner. There were also plenty of artists working outside Barbizon with similar aims of capturing fleeting sensations of light and shade and representing the landscape as our minds actually apprehend it. Most of these had some contact with the Barbizon group, and my first su