Professor Kermit Champa shares his new insight into the musical climate of the time; Fronia Wissman reexamines the relation of these avant-garde artists to the official Paris Salon; Richard R. Brettell presents the critical and theoretical background that provided a context for the rise of landscape painting; and Deborah Johnson traces in new ways the combined influence of the Japanese print and photography on painting. Insightful entries on the individual artists sort out the role of the painters and their work in the art-historical and musical context of mid-nineteenth-century life.

More than 100 works by artists such as Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796-1875), Théodore Rousseau (1812-1867), Jean-François Millet (1814-1875), Claude Monet (1840-1926), Gustave Le Gray (1820-1884), and Eugène Cuvelier (1837-1900) explore the French phenomenon of plein-air (open-air) painting and photography in the region of Fontainebleau, a pilgrimage site for aspiring landscape artists. The forest also inspired a new school of landscape photography, as figures such as Gustave Le Gray and Eugène Cuvelier, working side by side with painters, explored the camera's potential to reveal nature in a fresh and unadorned manner. The exhibition also includes 19th-century artists' equipment and tourist ephemera.

The Musée des Beaux-Arts, Reims owns the second largest collection of works by Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot after the Louvre, as well as excellent landscape paintings by artists of the Barbizon School. Corot was one of the most significant painters involved with the barbizonists. Studying the Reims holdings further, it seemed evident to edit a catalogue and curate an exhibition that reaches from the romantic spirit in French landscape painting to the School of Barbizon on to the group of artists around Eugène-Louis Boudin at Honfleur - the true cradle of Impressionism - and lastly to the impressionists Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro and Pierre-Auguste Renoir.00Exhibition: Cornell Fine Arts Museum, Winter Park, USA (20.01.-08.04.2018) / Frye Art Museum, Seattle, USA (12.05.-05.08.2018).

Highlights fromn the National Gallery collection.

Through 170 works, this catalogue analyzes the relationship between Impressionism and nature from an innovative angle. For the first time, the extraordinary pictorial innovations of the Impressionists are seen against a broader understanding of the nature, culture and modernity of the time. In other words, the Impressionists not only visually recorded the impact of modernity on the French landscape, but they also embraced a new holistic viewpoint which revealed the dynamism and condition of every social and natural system. The works trace the development of the representation of nature in French nineteenth century painting, beginning with the early innovations to classic norms brought about by painters of the Barbizon school, followed by a thorough exploration of the revolution caused by the great masters of Impressionism such as Monet, Sisley and Pissarro, and ending with the chromatic triumph of Monet's Waterlilies.

It takes a broad view, yet never loses sight of the intricacy and variation that make the landscape so endlessly appealing."--BOOK JACKET.

Professor Kermit Champa shares his new insight into the musical climate of the time; Fronia Wissman reexamines the relation of these avant-garde artists to the official Paris Salon; Richard R. Brettell presents the critical and theoretical background that provided a context for the rise of landscape painting; and Deborah Johnson traces in new ways the combined influence of the Japanese print and photography on painting. Insightful entries on the individual artists sort out the role of the painters and their work in the art-historical and musical context of mid-nineteenth-century life.

"An examination of the paintings Monet made en plein air alongside his artist colleagues, and the meaning and impact that this practice had on his fellow impressionists"--