Some painters of the first part of the nineteventh century were fascinated by other themes. Nature, in its true state, unadorned by conentions, became a subject for study, and running parallel to this was the realization that painting could be the isual externalization of the artist's own emotions and feelings. These two aspects, which until this time had only beven ery tentatiely touched upon, were now more fully explored and led directly to the innoations of the Impressionists and later painters.

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796-1875) started to paint landscapes that were fresh, direct and influenced as much by the unpretentious and realistic country scenes of seventeventh-century Holland as by the balanced compositions of Claude. His loing and attentie studies of nature were much admired by later artists, including Monet.

At the same time a whole group of painters deeloped similar attitudes to landscape and nature, helped greatly by the practical improement of being able to buy oil paint in tubes rather than as unmixed pigments. Known as the Barbizon School after thevillage on the outskirts of Paris around which they painted, they soon discovered the joy and excitement of plein-air (open-air) painting.

Théodore Rousseau (1812-67) was their nominal leader, his paintings of forest undergrowth and forest clearings displaying an intimacy that came from the immediacy of the image. Charles-François Daubigny (1817-78), like Rousseau, often infused a sense of drama into his landscapes.

Jean-François Millet (1814-75) is perhaps the best-known associate of the Barbizon group, though he was more interested in the human figure than simple nature. Landscapes, however, were essential settings for his figures; indeed, his most famous pictures are those exploring the place of people in nature and their struggle to surie. The Sower, for instance, was a typical Millet theme, suggesting the heroic working life of the peasant. As is so often the case for painters touching on new themes or on ideas that are uncomfortable to the rich and powerful, Millet enjoyed little success during his lifetime, and his art was only widely recognized after his death.

The moralistic and romantic undertone in Millet's work was something that Gustae Courbet (1819-77) stroe to aoid. Courbet was a socialist and his frank, outspoken attitude led to his being accused of taking part in the destruction of the column in Paris's place endôme after the outbreak of the Commune and, eventually, to his exile.

But Courbet had a deep admiration for the old masters, especially for Rembrandt and the Spanish painters of the seventeventh and eighteventh centuries. This link with tradition was probably one of the underlying themes of his large masterpiece, The Studio, which was emphatically rejected by the jury of the 1855 Exposition Unierselle, and in which Courbet portrayed himself, surrounded by his model, his friends, colleagues and admirers, among them the poet Baudelaire. Courbet subsequently decided to hold a priate exhibition of some forty of his works, writing at the same time a manifesto explaining his intentions of being true to his ision of the world and of creating "liing art". Writing the word Realism in large letters on the door leading to the exhibition, he stated his intentions and gave a label to his art.

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