The Romantic Movement In France

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

It was not till the Great Exhibition at Paris in 1867 that Millet came into his own, and his opportunity came then because his friend Théodore Rousseau was President of the Jury. In this exhibition Millet was represented by ‘The Angelus’ ‘The Gleaners’, and seven other important paintings. He was awarded a first class medal for the collection, and in the following year was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor. He was now at the height of his fame, but the honors and fortune which followed came too late to be enjoyed. The artist was deeply smitten by the death of Rousseau in December 1867, and his own health began to fail in 1870. During the disasterous Franco-Prussian war he retired to Cherbourg, where his work was interrupted by frequent illnesses. When he returned to Paris, the new Republican Government gave Millet a commission in 1874 to paint a set of decorative panels of ‘The Four Seasons’ for the Panthéon, but though he at once began charcoal sketches for these subjects he was never able to execute the paintings. Throughout the autumn his health declined, and surrounded by his devoted family he died on the 20th January 1875.

Closely associated with Millet, whom he accompanied to Barbizon, was Charles Jacque (1813-94), who, though less poweful than Troyon, was one of the best animal painters of his time. He excelled in painting flocks of sheep in the open or on the edge of a forest. The painting of peasant life, inaugurated by Millet, was continued by Bastien Lepage (1848-84) and the still more popular Jules Breton (1827-1906), who, though weaker in drawing and less rich in color, reaped where Millet had sown. Associated with Diaz, and still more fantastic than this painter in the exotic pictures of his earlier years, was Adolphe Monticelli (1824-86). Born at Marseilles, Monticelli brought the warmth of Southern coloring and imagination to Barbizon: he was the most romantic of the romantic landscape painters, and his canvases loaded with rich pigment, from which radiant fairy-like figures emerge and seem to quiver with life, are magical masterpieces of jewel-like color.

Belonging to a slightly later generation, but encouraged in his youth by Corot, Daubigny, and Millet, the exquisite sea painter Eugene Boudin (1825-98) is a link between the Barbizon School and the Impressionists. Boudin was born at Honfleur, where his father was a sea-captain, and during his early years he assisted Troyon by painting the skies in some of his pictures. This was a department of painting in which Boudin excelled, and his rendering of the clouds and the blue vault of heaven excited the keen admiration of Corot, who hailed his young contemporary as ‘the monarch of the sky.’ Boudin spent the greater part of his life in the neighborhood of his birthplace, and never tired of painting the shipping, shores, and harbor scenes of this part of the Normandy coast. His paintings are pitched in a slightly higher key of color than those of Corot and Daubigny, and the prevalence of luminous pearly greys in his work have caused his paintings—together with similar paintings of similar subjects of his slightly older contemporary, the Dutchman Bartholde Jongkind—to be known as la peinture gris, i.e the ‘grey’ school of painting. ‘The Harbor of Trouville’ in the National Gallery is a beautiful example of Boudin’s delicate realism and of his sensitive feeling for the wind in the sky and the light on the water.