The term “Barbizon school” has been extended from its narrower meaning,
in which it merely comprises Rousseau, Diaz, Millet and the disciples
who joined them, to form a little artistic colony on the edge of the
Forest of Fontainebleau, to a less accurate but now generally accepted
wider application, embracing “the men of 1830,” who collectively and
individually set out, inspired indirectly by Constable, upon the
conquest of light and atmosphere through intimate communion with
nature. In a pedantic survey of this Barbizon school, Rousseau would
have to take honour of place as the leader of the group, whilst Corot
and Daubigny, neither of whom actually worked at Barbizon, would have
to be altogether excluded. But in the more liberal interpretation of
the term, which we have here adopted, Jean Baptiste Camille Corot
(1796-1875) must be given first place as the doyen of the whole group,
since he alone was born before the eighteenth century had run its
course.