Charles-François Daubigny

Charles-François Daubigny was born on February 15, 1817, in Paris, the son of a landscape painter. He trained under Paul Delaroche and in Italy in 1836, then returned to Paris to pursue a career as a landscape painter. He was associated from the 1840s with the Barbizon School, working alongside Corot, Millet, and Rousseau in the Forest of Fontainebleau and along the rivers of the Île-de-France.

Daubigny became one of the most important landscape painters of 19th-century France and a crucial transitional figure between Barbizon and Impressionism. His riverine subjects — the Oise, the Seine, the Marne — painted from his famous studio boat 'Le Botin,' showed an unprecedented attention to the movement of water, the specific quality of sky and light reflected in rivers, and the freshness of plein-air observation. He befriended Monet and Pissarro in the late 1860s, supported them before the Salon jury, and his own painting showed increasing looseness and luminosity that brought it close to Impressionism.

Works from our collection — Landscape on the River Oise (1872), Landscape with a Sunlit Stream (1877), The Painter's Barge at the Île de Vaux (1877), French Orchard at Harvest Time (1876) — represent his mature style in its full achievement. He died in Paris on February 19, 1878.

Daubigny's mature style is characterized by its freshness of observation and willingness to leave the painted surface in a relatively sketch-like state that his critics called unfinished but that later viewers recognize as a virtue. His riverine subjects — the Oise and Seine in all weathers and seasons — have a tonal luminosity and atmospheric truth that directly influenced the Impressionists. His handling of water is particularly accomplished: the surface of a river in light, reflections disturbed by current, boats and their mirror-images.

His later works — The Painter's Barge (1877), Landscape with a Sunlit Stream (1877) — show the most directly proto-Impressionist quality: loose, varied brushwork, high-keyed color, a freshness of atmospheric observation.

Daubigny is one of the most important precursors of Impressionism in French landscape painting, and his personal support of Monet and Pissarro before Salon juries in the late 1860s had direct practical consequences for the careers of the Impressionists. His riverine landscapes anticipated Monet's serial investigations of water and light by a decade and established the legitimacy of loose, atmospheric outdoor painting within the Salon tradition.