Charles François Daubigny - Oil Painting Reproductions

1817 - 1878 • French • Painter • Barbizon School

"It seems as if the canvas exposed in front of the site had painted itself by some magic process and new invention." - Theophile Gautier, 1859

Born into a family of artists, Daubigny decorated trinkets for a clockmaker and worked as a restorer of paintings at the Louvre. He studied with DELAROCHE and traveled to Rome. His success in the early 1850s was marred by complaints that his landscapes lacked finish. In 18 59, the year he was named Chevalier of the Legion of Honor, a CARTOON appeared showing a man in his bathing trunks standing in front of a large painting. The caption read: "Effect produced on a visitor to the Salon by the water in the marvelous paintings of M. Daubigny." The name of the actual painting, which hung in that year's SALON, was The Banks of the Oise. The renowned photographer NADAR both bought the painting and printed the cartoon in a newspaper he published. Some critics, in fact, found a photographic quality in the painting-perhaps the magic new invention to which Gautier refers in his review quoted above. Daubigny worked on his famous studio-boat, the Botin, from which he painted his riverscapes.