Landscape with Inlet of Water

Although a figure on a boat appears to the left of this picture, the subject is clearly the landscape whose leafy trees almost obscure the sky. Harpignies belonged to the so-called Barbizon school of painters who would gather near the rural village of Barbizon outside Paris to share ideas. In opposition to the formal clarity of other 19th-century painting that explored literary or historical subjects, the Barbizon painters were interested in the realistic depiction of nature, inspired in part by the naturalistic landscapes of the English Romantic painter John Constable (1776–1836). Rather than using landscape as a backdrop, these painters made the rural setting the protagonist of their paintings, employing the direct observation of nature to reproduce real places and moments in time.