Charles François Daubigny
Charles François Daubigny (1817–1878) was a French landscape painter and printmaker whose career joined sustained observation of the countryside with an increasing freedom of handling. He first trained with his father, also a painter, and financed an early journey to Italy through decorative work. After returning to Paris, he worked in the Louvre's restoration department and began exhibiting at the Salon in 1838.
Travel remained central to his practice. He painted in Normandy, Burgundy and the forest of Fontainebleau, and worked with Corot in Switzerland and the Dauphiné. In 1857 he converted a boat into a floating studio, giving himself a mobile viewpoint along the Oise, Marne and Seine. The arrangement brought his work close to the changing light, banks and reflections that became recurring landscape subjects.
Daubigny also treated printmaking as an independent art rather than simply a means of reproducing paintings. Etching and experiments with cliché-verre accompanied his work in oil. His rapid strokes and less polished surfaces could draw criticism, but he supported younger painters associated with Impressionism. His landscapes reward attention to the interval between a precisely identified place and a painted surface that remains visibly responsive to the act of looking. His subjects repeatedly bring water, inhabited ground and open sky into relation.
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