Daubigny, Monet, Van Gogh

The exhibition "Daubigny, Monet, Van Gogh: Impressions of Landscape" introduces Charles François Daubigny, a relatively forgotten artist from the 1800s. It explores his landscape painting and his influence on the younger generation of artists known as the French Impressionists.

Born in Paris in 1817, Daubigny studied Dutch landscapes in the Louvre Museum and trained with painters at the French Academy. He painted this early forest view delicately and precisely, using small brushes.

In about 1851, Daubigny painted this view of peasants harvesting grain in the fields just northeast of Paris. He wanted to capture the diffuse sunlight shimmering through the hazy atmosphere on a hot summer day in central France.

On a diagonal path alongside an orchard of flowering apple trees, a young woman rides a donkey. Behind her walk two young lovers, their heads barely visible above the fields of new grain. The scene evokes spring, with its fragrance, bursting growth, and romance. Surprisingly, this was not a common subject for painters at the time.

Daubigny traveled extensively to paint France’s many landscapes. Here, he captures the appearance of a still pond in the hills above the Rhône Valley.

In 1857, Daubigny bought an old ferryboat and equipped it with a cabin so that he could paint the French riverbanks from the water.

After his first venture on his studio boat, Daubigny embarked on more painting trips—often for weeks at a time—in spring, summer, and fall. The pictures created on his boat trips have a watery foreground that features reflections of the sky, clouds, and trees. No one had ever painted landscapes like this; he had invented another new compositional type that everyone recognized then as highly original.

Daubigny first encountered the ocean when visiting the Normandy coast in 1854. He wrote, “I see the ocean, and it is so beautiful that I don’t want to go anywhere else, and I can’t wait to work!”

At the Salon of 1864, Monet saw Daubigny’s "Cliffs at Villerville" and must have appreciated the way it captured the ever-changing light and weather at the seashore. Soon Monet created his own large picture of another stretch of beach and cliffs in Normandy, and exhibited it at the following year’s Salon, as if in dialogue with Daubigny.

Monet visited the Netherlands and painted this landscape near the village of Zaandam, very likely from a boat, in the manner of Daubigny. Like the older artist, Monet concentrated on the colorful reflections in the water and on capturing nuances of light and atmosphere.

Daubigny loved to paint the color transformations produced by sunsets over the sea at Villerville, his favorite spot on the coast. Whereas many earlier landscapists had depicted the natural world in a state of timeless perfection, Daubigny was fascinated by the transitory conditions of nature.

Every spring, Daubigny joyfully painted flowering trees. In late works such as this one, he brought his sketch style—with its broad, free strokes—into his large exhibition pictures. This was quite a change from his early, more precise way of painting.

When Daubigny painted outdoors, he translated his feeling for nature into an outpouring of spontaneous brushwork. In fact, his commitment to open air painting greatly exceeded that of any other artist before the Impressionists. In this picture, using his favorite extra-wide canvas shape, he depicted the very same wheat fields that Vincent Van Gogh would portray in his famous last paintings, just 15 years later.

This was the last canvas on Daubigny’s easel before his death in February of 1878. Here, he portrays the fields of Auvers in the early evening, as a shepherd and his flock head back to the village.

After the Franco-Prussian War, Pissarro painted this blooming orchard, a subject then strongly associated with Daubigny. In Pissarro’s orchard picture, the laboring peasants and freshly turned soil anchor the image more firmly in the here and now. However, just like Daubigny, Pissarro worked outdoors, delicately brushing the pale colors of blossoms onto his canvas and celebrating spring and renewal.

In this picture, Monet’s low point of view—close to the water’s surface—suggests that he was working from a boat. Indeed, in 1872 or 1873 Monet set up a floating studio, emulating Daubigny.

Van Gogh painted orchards during the two springs that he spent in Arles, in southern France, in 1888 and 1889. He created this painting outdoors during the second year, using rhythmically dashed strokes, daring blue-purple outlines for trees and rocks, and vivid greens to express his joyous feelings about the passing of winter.

After moving to Auvers in 1890, Van Gogh was drawn to the same fields that Daubigny had painted. He wrote to his brother, Theo van Gogh: “I am completely absorbed in that immense plain covered with fields of wheat against the hills, boundless as the sea in delicate colors of yellow and green, the pale violet of the plowed and weeded earth checkered at regular intervals with the green of the flowering potato plants, everything under a sky of delicate blue, white, pink and violet.”

When Van Gogh settled in Auvers to seek care from the physician, Dr. Gachet, he learned with delight that Daubigny had had a home in Auvers. In mid-June 1890, he painted his first small study of Daubigny’s garden. In July, he made this larger version of the house and its property, adding the small dark figure of Madame Daubigny in the distance at the left, along with a black cat in the foreground.

Daubigny made lasting contributions to landscape painting. He invented new landscape types such as the agricultural landscape, the spring orchard, and the mid-river view. The Impressionists eagerly adopted these subjects, and learned a great deal from Daubigny’s ground-breaking experiments.