Charles Jacque
1813 - 1894

Charles Jacque was one of a group of early nineteenth-century French artists (and later their American followers) who would eventually become known as the Barbizon School for the village on the edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau where most of them gathered to paint. The movement began as a reaction against the dictates of the academic art establishment. Academic standards of the time were based upon the neo-classicism of the 18 th century and insisted upon a polished finish, muted colors, historical or genre subjects, and a representational style of painting that eliminated the visible hand of the painter. In the 1830s, influenced by Dutch 17 th century landscapes and the more recent English painters Constable and Turner, these artists began challenging the standards of the Salon. Led by Theodore Rousseau, they favored personal expression instead of academic rules and painted their local rural landscapes using coarsely applied pigment that left traces of the brush and dabs of paint or swaths of color that sought to convey an emotional state rather than a meticulous depiction of a particular scene.

Jacque had come to Barbizon fleeing a cholera epidemic in Paris . Having heard about a village where great artistic things were happening, he and his friend Jean-Francois Millet set out to find it, despite the fact that all Jacque could remember was the fact that the name ended in “-zon”. When they found it, they also found inhabitants like Corot, Daubigny, Diaz, Daumier, Barye, and Troyon, as well as a home for life. Millet and Jacque immediately rented barns to use as studios.

Along with landscapes, some of the Barbizon artists turned to the depiction of such humble motifs as domestic animals, or occasionally exotic animals, in realistic rather than classical poses. Jacque began chicken farming and wrote what was for a time the standard work on maintaining a chicken farm, Le Poulailler . He soon became famous for his paintings and etchings of chickens and pigs, becoming so adept at his pig portraiture that the critics jocularly called him “ le Raphael de couchons” – “the Raphael of pigs”. Yet another critic of the time enthused:

In the mid-1850s when Jacque painted Ploughing , the famous writers the Goncourt Brothers noted that two strains had emerged in landscape art: 1) the picturesque and sanitized versions of the countryside, and 2) the more overtly aggressive landscapes featuring the realities of the peasant workers. Jacque's and Millet's paintings both belonged to the second category, documenting the work of the poor in the rural communities around Barbizon and recording traditional activities that were being threatened by government legislation.

From 1859 on, the paintings of the Barbizon School began to circulate throughout Europe as their work increased in popularity. Though they remained to some extent artistic rebels, the Barbizon artists increasingly held positions of authority in the art establishment throughout the 1860s. Jacque received seven third class medals from various Salon exhibitions, and he and Rousseau both received the Legion d'Honneur in 1867. After the Franco-Prussian War and the conflict surrounding the Paris Commune, the Barbizon School began to die out and by the end of the 1870s, most of them were gone. Jacque established a factory to produce “artistic furniture” and continued to sell his work through dealers. In 1881, he helped establish and was elected the first president of the Societe des Animaliers Francais. His final award came at the 1889 Exposition Universelle where he won a gold medal for painting and a grand prix for printmaking. By then the elderly Jacque was calling himself “the last of the romantics”. Ending an era, he died in 1894.

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