Towards Impressionism: Landscape Painting from Corot to Monet

Edited by Suzanne Greub, Art Centre Basel

Towards Impressionism traces the development of French landscape painting from the schools of Barbizon and Honfleur up to Impressionism, featuring over forty works from the extraordinary collection of the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Reims.

The Reims museum has one of the world’s foremost collections of landscape paintings by artists associated with the Barbizon colony—artists like Théodore Rousseau, Charles-François Daubigny, Jean-François Millet, and Constant Troyon who gathered in the village of Barbizon between 1830 and 1855 to paint in and around the nearby Forest of Fontainebleau. Canvases by Eugène Boudin, another major visionary of plein air painting, and the artists he mentored in the seaside environs of Honfleur—including Gustave Courbet and Impressionists such as Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir—capture stylistic innovations developed elsewhere in France. Camille Corot, a senior figure to both groups and frequent visitor to Barbizon and Honfleur, is a particular focus of the exhibition. Reims’s collection of Corot’s work is second only to the Louvre.

This catalogue includes essays by Michael Clarke, former director of the Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh, and Frances Fowle, senior curator at the Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh that further contextualize and examine the century-long cultural shift away from the Academy that legitimated landscape as a subject and elevated the subjective experience of the artist.

144 pages, 7 3/4 x 9 3/4 in.

100 illustrations, full-color

Hard cover, 2017