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for CHARLES FRANCOIS DAUBIGNY
CHARLES FRANCOIS DAUBIGNY
1817 - 1878
(b Paris, 15 Feb 1817; d Paris, 19 Feb 1878).
Painter and printmaker. He studied under his father Edmond-François Daubigny and in 1831-2 also trained with Jacques-Raymond Brascassat. At an early age he copied works by Ruisdael and Poussin in the Louvre, while also pursuing an apprenticeship as an engraver. At this time he drew and painted mainly at Saint-Cloud and Clamart, near Paris, and in the Forest of Fontainebleau (1834-5). In 1835 he visited several Italian cities and towns, including Rome, Frascati, Tivoli, Florence, Pisa and Genoa. He returned to Paris in 1836 and worked for François-Marius Granet in the painting restoration department of the Louvre. In 1840 he spent several months drawing from life in Paul Delaroche's studio, although his early works were much more heavily influenced by 17th-century Dutch painters, whom he copied in the Louvre, than by Delaroche's work.
In 1838 Daubigny first exhibited at the Salon in Paris, with an etching, View of Notre-Dame-de-Paris and the Ile Saint-Louis, and he continued to exhibit regularly there until 1868. He travelled a great deal, visiting Etretat and Dieppe on the coast of Normandy in 1842. From 1843 he spent much time in the Forest of Fontainebleau, sending his first painting of a Fontainebleau scene,
Two years later he and Corot-by now his close friend-spent considerable time painting in the Dauphiné and in Switzerland. Daubigny also painted with Armand Leleux at Dardagny, near Geneva, in 1853, and on the banks of the River Oise in 1856. His method of working en plein air was later to be greatly significant to Monet.
Critics praised two of his paintings submitted to the Salon of 1852-the Harvest (Paris, Louvre) and View of the Banks of the Seine from Bezon (Paris, Mus. d'Orsay)-for their luminous colours, fluid atmosphere and simple motifs, although they reproached him for what they saw as carelessness of execution. In 1859 he was commissioned to paint decorative scenes (the Stags, the Herons, the Palace, the Garden of Tuileries) for the entrance hall and stairway of the Salons du Ministère d'Etat in the Louvre. He also produced engravings after works by such artists as Ruisdael and Claude for the Louvre's Department of Chalcography and from 1853 executed numerous prints in the technique of cliché-verre (see Cliché-verre, §2).
Daubigny was one of the first landscape painters to take an interest in the changing and fleeting aspects of nature, depicting them with a light and rapid brushstroke. He was an important figure in the development of a naturalistic type of landscape painting, bridging the gap between Romantic feeling and the more objective work of the Impressionists.
WRITINGS
E. Moreau-Nélaton: Daubigny raconté par lui-même (Paris, 1950)
BIBLIOGRAPHY
T. Gauthier: Abécédaire du Salon de 1861 (Paris, 1861), p. 119
F. Henriet: C. Daubigny et son oeuvre gravé (Paris, 1875)
J. Claretie: 'Daubigny', Première série de peintres et sculpteurs contemporains: Artistes décédés de 1870 à 1880 (Paris, 1881-4), pp. 265-88
L. Delteil: Daubigny, xiii of Le Peintre-graveur illustré (Paris, 1906-26/R New York, 1969)
J. Laran: Daubigny (Paris, 1913)
M. Fidell-Beaufort: The Graphic Art of Charles-François Daubigny, 2 vols (diss., New York U., Inst. F.A., 1974)
J. Bailly-Herzberg and M. Fidell-Beaufort: Daubigny: La Vie et l'oeuvre (Paris, 1975)
P. Miquel: L'Ecole de la nature, iii of Le Paysage au XIXe siècle, 1814-1874 (Maurs-la-Jolie, 1975), pp. 664-705
LAURENCE PAUCHET-WARLOP
© Oxford University Press 2007
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