Rejecting the centralizing tendencies of nineteenth-century urbanism, many artists turned their attention to local terrain as a statement of independence. Less constrained by academic principles, they felt greater freedom to be innovative by painting landscapes.

The “School of Tervuren” was a group that painted in the forests and fields of a small village just east of Brussels. Influenced by the artists of the French Barbizon School, especially Jean-François Millet and Gustave Courbet, they devoted themselves to quiet scenes of the Belgian countryside. By 1863 they established a small artist colony in Tervuren. The Tervuren artists share a Romantic response to the region and to nature, and a commitment to a realist approach that faithfully records natural phenomena in a modern style. Above all, they viewed nature as offering an escape from the industrialization, burdens, and dizzying spectacle of the modern city.

The label “School of Tervuren” is not unproblematic; there was no formal organization of artists associated with it. Hippolyte Boulenger and fellow artists Théodore Fourmois, Joseph Coosemans met often at the inn Au Renard (In den Vos) on the market square of Tervuren, and Boulenger used the term for his entry at the 1866 Salon in Brussels.

Tervuren was only one of many groups of artists who gathered to paint landscapes in the second half of the nineteenth century. Locales such as Barbizon, Pont-Aven, and Giverny in France have become famous, along with Worpswede, Darmstadt, and Murnau in Germany and Skagen in Denmark. There are parallels with the Hudson River School in the United States. In Belgium clusters of artists were also found in Anseremme near Dinant, Verviers near Liège, Sint-Martens-Latem near Ghent, and Brasschaat and the Scheldt region near Antwerp.