Until the mid-nineteenth century, landscape painting in France—produced in the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture and hung in the jury‑selected Salons—was mostly as settings for grand, timeless allegorical, religious and historical paintings.

Bathed in soft ethereal light, these were not reflections of contemporary life in the French countryside. Inspired by the work of British landscape specialists, a new generation of French artists abandoned the strictures of the Academy and its ideals: Camille Corot, Charles Daubigny and others left their studios, models and props behind to paint France as they saw it.

Working in the town of Barbizon, and near the forests of Fontainebleau, the produced by this new school of art was described as ‘the painting of democrats, of men who never change their linen, who want to force themselves on the fashionable world’. In the following decade, Realist artists like Gustave Courbet developed a popular following for their gritty rural scenes. In 1868 writer Émile Zola wrote ‘the classical landscape is dead, killed by life and truth’.