These paintings are part of a long tradition, extending to 17th-century Dutch painting, that celebrates the landscape as a timeless force representing the "enduring truths of nature."

Théodore Rousseau established this tradition in France where he painted outdoors, or en plein-air, in the Forest of Barbizon a short distance south of Paris. Rousseau viewed the forest as the Arcadian idyll, free of industrialization and urban blight. By 1855, the Barbizon landscape had emerged as the great school of French painting and Rousseau as the acknowledged leader of the "naturalist" movement in French art. Barbizon landscapes represent a personal vision distinguished by a heavy application of pigment and loose brushwork.

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The sturdy oak trees occupying the center of the painting were favorite compositional devices for Rousseau who saw them symbolically as patriarchal figures whose existence represented a continuum with the past. The rusticated farmhouse in the background signals that human presence is subordinate to the landscape. This is reinforced by the small anonymous figure sitting in the boat with his back to the viewer at foreground.

Thomas Worthington Whittredge did not come under the influence of the French Barbizon style until the mid-1870s. The view of an intimate glade surrounded by woods in Pool and Heron was a major departure from the grand vistas of the Hudson River school he had painted during previous decades. In keeping with the Barbizon manner, Whittredge has depicted a quiet place for solitude and contemplation. Typical of Whittredge is his use of trees as a way of framing and separating the shadowy foreground from the open sunlit space in the background. Moreover, he retained the primacy of nature over the human presence advocated by Rousseau; he includes the heron in his title and excludes any mention of the diminutive figure of the hunter barely visible in the background. The finished look of these paintings compared with later landscapes demonstrates they were completed, over time, in the studio.

• Berthe Morisot (French) and Guy Orlando Rose (American)
• Albert Belleroche (British, active in Paris) and Robert Henri (American)
• Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (French) and John Henry Twachtman (American)
• Théodore Rousseau(French) and Thomas Worthington Whittredge (American)

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