Landscape with a Sunlit Stream

Painted in 1877 and held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, this landscape by Charles-François Daubigny depicts a sunlit stream—possibly in the Oise valley where he lived and worked—with the soft, atmospheric naturalism that made him the most influential precursor of Impressionism among the Barbizon painters. Daubigny had famously built a studio boat ('Le Botin') to paint river subjects from the water, and his river and stream landscapes, with their reflective surfaces and overarching trees, directly influenced Monet's Argenteuil paintings. The sunlit stream offered him the play of light on water that was his signature subject.

Daubigny captures the sunlit stream through soft, broken brushwork that describes the play of light on moving water without the tight finish of academic landscape. The overhanging trees create a canopy that dapples the light, and his warm yellow-green palette gives the scene the gentle luminosity of a fine afternoon in the Île-de-France.