"In the second quarter of the nineteenth century, the village of Barbizon outside Paris became the center for a group of artists--notably Millet, Rousseau, Daubigny, and Corot--whose work displayed an intimate view of nature and rural existence as an escape from the distasteful pace and change of city life. They created rustic landscapes, pastoral scenes of grazing sheep and cows, and peasants toiling in the fields. By combining a strongly personal sense of the real and the poetic, their art projected a mood which came to be identified as "Barbizon." Aesthetically and technically, the French Barbizon painters influenced the work of several generations of American landscape artists from the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth. As an escape into the rural past, Barbizon art became especially popular in the United States following the Civil War, providing an effective antidote for post-war disillusion."--Page 4 of cover.