Fontainebleau, town, Seine-et-Marne département, Île-de-France région, northern France, 40 miles (65 km) south-southeast of Paris by road. The town is situated in the Forest of Fontainebleau, 2 miles from the left bank of the Seine. The famous château southeast of the town is one of the largest residences built by the kings of France. Originally a medieval royal hunting lodge enlarged by Louis IX, or St. Louis (1214–70), it was entirely rebuilt by the best French architects of the time in 1527; only one tower of the earlier building still stands. Famed craftsmen, including the Italian painter Francesco Primaticcio and the Italian sculptor Benvenuto Cellini, were called to the court to further embellish the palace; these artists, collectively referred to as the School of Fontainebleau, blended Italian and French styles. Henry II (reigned 1547–59), Catherine de Médicis (1519–89), and Henry IV (reigned 1589–1610) enlarged the palace. The spacious gardens were redesigned by André Le Nôtre, the 17th-century French landscape architect, during the reign of Louis XIV. The château is a succession of five courtyards of different shapes. The Gallery of Francis I (reigned 1515–47), the horseshoe exterior staircase, the ballroom, and the council chamber are of particular interest. The château is surrounded by pleasant gardens crossed by a canal built in the reign of Henry IV. The château and its gardens were named a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1981.

Fontainebleau was little more than a hamlet until the 19th century, when it became a popular resort for Parisian holidaymakers. Three historical documents signed at the château were the revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV (1685); the concordat between France and Rome (1814); and (in the same year) Napoleon’s act of abdication. During World War II the palace of Fontainebleau was a German headquarters. Liberated in 1944 by U.S. Gen. George Patton, it was the seat of a Western Allied headquarters from 1945 to 1965. The national forest of Fontainebleau is one of the most scenic wooded tracts in France. It covers 42,000 acres (17,000 ha); nearly a quarter of it is rocky.

The town has little industry, and its economy is dominated by administrative and service activities, including tourism. Fontainebleau is also the seat of various educational institutions. Pop. (1999) 15,942; (2014 est.) 14,637.

Tower Bridge over the Thames River in London, England. Opened in 1894. Remains an Important Traffic Route with 40,000 Crossings Every Day.
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This article was most recently revised and updated by Heather Campbell.

Barbizon school, mid-19th-century French school of painting, part of a larger European movement toward naturalism in art, that made a significant contribution to the establishment of Realism in French landscape painting. Inspired by the Romantic movement’s search for solace in nature, the Barbizon painters nevertheless turned away from the melodramatic picturesqueness of established Romantic landscape painters as well as from the classical academic tradition, which used landscape merely as a backdrop for allegory and historical narrative. The Barbizon artists painted landscape in realistic terms and for its own sake. They based their art on the works of 17th-century French and Dutch and contemporary English landscape painters, all of whom approached their subject with sensitive observation and a deep love of nature.

The name of the school was taken from the village of Barbizon, on the edge of the great forest of Fontainebleau near Paris, where the school’s leaders, Théodore Rousseau and Jean-François Millet, driven from Paris by poverty and lack of success, settled in 1846 and 1849, respectively. They attracted a large following of landscape and animal painters, some going to live at Barbizon, others visiting only infrequently; those of the group who were to become most notable were Charles-François Daubigny, Narcisse-Virgile Diaz de La Peña, Jules Dupré, Charles Jacque, and Constant Troyon, all of whom had had indifferent success in Paris.

Each Barbizon painter had his own style and specific interests. Rousseau’s vision was melancholy, concentrating on vast sweeps of landscape and looming trees. Dupré’s close-range, detailed scenes are suffused with foreboding. Daubigny favoured scenes of lush, verdant fields, and Diaz painted sun-dappled forest interiors. Troyon and Jacque painted placid scenes that featured livestock. Millet, the only major painter of the group for whom pure landscape was unimportant, made monumental paintings of peasants that celebrate the nobility of human life in sympathy with nature. All of these artists, in spite of their Romantic inspiration, emphasized the simple and ordinary rather than the terrifying and monumental aspects of nature. Unlike their English contemporaries, they had little interest in the surface effects of light and colour or in atmospheric variations. Instead, they emphasized permanent features, painting solid, detailed forms in a limited range of colours. They were also concerned with mood, and they altered physical appearances to express what they saw as the objective “character” of the landscape.

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Having suffered for some time from a total lack of recognition, the Barbizon painters began to gain popularity by mid-century. Most won official recognition from the Académie des Beaux-Arts and started receiving large prices for their paintings; their work was particularly popular at the end of the century. Some of the Barbizon painters were masters of composition and description; others were less competent. But their historical importance is undeniable, for as a group they were instrumental in establishing pure, objective landscape painting as a legitimate genre in France.