Banks of the Sèvre (Vendée)

Rousseau was the central figure of the so-called Barbizon School of painters, named for a village on the edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau, near Paris, where these artists often worked. United by a love for their native landscape, they determined to paint the world around them as they observed it, instead of restructuring it according to the idealizing conventions established by centuries of tradition. In their commitment to direct visual response to nature and their interest in the effects of changing seasons and times of day, the Barbizon artists were important precursors of the Impressionists.