Théodore Rousseau

For years the Paris Salon jury turned Théodore Rousseau away so reliably that he earned a nickname, le grand refusé, the great rejected one. His crime was to paint plain French landscape, oak trees and marshes and evening skies, as if it were a worthy subject in its own right, at a time when official taste still wanted history and mythology.

So he left the city. In the 1840s Rousseau settled at Barbizon, a village on the edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau near Paris, and a loose group of like-minded painters gathered there to work directly in front of nature. They became the Barbizon School, an important step on the road from studio landscape toward the open-air painting of the Impressionists who followed.

Rousseau also fought to protect the forest itself, and helped persuade the authorities to set aside a protected reserve among the old trees, an early act of conservation. He stayed at Barbizon the rest of his life, close to his friend the peasant-painter Jean-François Millet, and died there in 1867 with Millet at his bedside.