Charles-François Daubigny
(1817 - 1878)
Sur l'Oise
Oil on panel
12 x 19.5 inches
Framed dimensions:
18.75 x 26.5 inches
Signed and dated 1876
BIOGRAPHY - Charles-François Daubigny (1817 - 1878)

During the nineteenth century, several progressive artists emerged who impacted the future direction of art and its public acceptance. Charles-François Daubigny was one of these artists, an influence on and a fervent supporter of the emerging Impressionist group. Despite his success as a landscape painter, his work often solicited mixed responses from critics. As he matured, so did his style. Although he attained success, those pictures most appreciated by the public were those least appreciated by Daubigny himself, attesting to his work’s dual nature of salability and progressiveness. Like many other artists, his style opened the doors for the younger generation. Still, Daubigny combined his talent for painting and printmaking with a will to uphold the ideals of his artistic taste by taking decisive action that often showed his support for newer tendencies.
Charles-François Daubigny was born on February 15, 1817, in Paris. He wrote that he knew how to paint before he knew how to read. Drawing came naturally to him, an unsurprising fact considering that his father, Edme Daubigny, was a student of Jean-Victor Bertin who exhibited landscape paintings at several Salons. When he was nine, his mother sent him to live with a caretaker in Valmondois in the Val d’Oise region, a woman whom he would affectionately refer to as Mère Bazot. He left Valmondois in 1826 but remained attached to this village and to Mère Bazot. The location often figured as a key component of his later works. After returning to Paris at fifteen, Daubigny began decorating clock faces, jewelry boxes, and fan bases to assist the family’s income. To further continue his artistic inclinations, he began working at the Louvre in 1834, restoring old paintings for which he received five francs apiece. He later found work painting decorative panels at the Château of Versailles. This work was undertaken mainly to provide Daubigny with sufficient funds for proper artistic training. In 1835, he entered the atelier of Pierre-Asthasie-Theodore Sentiès, an academic painter. While Daubigny showed works that were far from an academic painting style, Sentiès was a suitable teacher for him since he was seeking acceptance from the Salon. His loftiest goal was to obtain the Prix de Rome of 1837.
The Prix de Rome was awarded every four years to a talented young art student who could study in Italy at the Villa Medici for four years. The award also ensured the winner with a guarantee of success upon his return to France. But Daubigny and a fellow painter, Henri Mignan, took matters into their own hands, pooling together extra money from their small jobs. By February 1836, the two aspiring artists had saved enough to depart on their own journey through Italy. They reached Rome in April 1836, where they discovered landscapes very different from what they had seen before. Rather than admiring works in Italian museums, they spent most of their time outdoors, experiencing nature in a unique and inspirational setting. The two men spent almost two months traveling throughout Italy, returning to Paris in November 1836. Daubigny immediately re-entered the Sentiès atelier, continuing his work towards the Prix de Rome. After his travels through Italy, he chose to concentrate on historical landscape for the contest. He passed the initial exam but did not make it through the second level. Still, he was determined to continue and decided to wait the four years to try again. He was accepted for the first time into the 1838 Salon, exhibiting Vue de Notre Dame de Paris et de l’Île Saint Louis (View of Notre Dame of Paris and the Île Saint-Louis) alongside his father, a fact that mitigated his disappointment over the rejection at the 1837 Prix de Rome competition.
His first success at the Salon prompted him and his colleagues to form an artistic association. Daubigny and his friends lived at 54 rue Vieille du Temple, including Victor Geoffroy-Dechaume, Louis Trimolet, and Louis Steinheil. To capitalize on each of their mild successes, they took the unusual step of coming together as a small association in a show of seemingly selfless camaraderie and economic initiative. The arrangement is described in the most recent and definitive work written on Daubigny, in which Madeleine Fidell-Beaufort and Janine Bailly-Herzberg note that “as a group they were imbued with the doctrine of Fourier and the image of an ‘artistic phalanstery’ dominated their thoughts. Daubigny, Geoffroy-Dechaume, Trimolet and Steinheil decided to pool their resources and to each year designate one, among them, to be a candidate at the Salon. During the time necessary for the preparation, the elected one and his family would be financed by the three others.” [i] As a part of this group, Daubigny completed his first wood engravings and etchings. He was also commissioned to illustrate a guide to the Château of Versailles. At busy times, commissions were handed from one artist to the other, guaranteeing that each artist had sufficient work. The group did not last long, but it gave Daubigny valuable experience in printmaking and landscape drawing, which he would use in his later work.
During the four-year hiatus between the 1837 and 1841 Prix de Rome competitions, Daubigny still focused on preparing himself. He traveled to Rome and worked on new landscapes, gaining more experience with his commissions through his colleagues’ association. Though this training proved extremely valuable, he also realized that since he was entering the category of historical landscape painting, he would need to be accepted into another Salon before he could have any chance to win the competition. To this end, he enrolled in the atelier of the popular academic artist Paul Delaroche. At the 1840 Salon, he exhibited Saint Jérome dans le Désert (Saint Jerome in the Desert) and Vue Prise dans la Vallée de l’Oisans (View from the Valley of Oisans). The next year, he showed Vue sur les Bords du Furon près de Sassenage dans l’Isère (View from the Banks of the Furon near Sassenage in Isère). Each success further encouraged his entry into the Prix de Rome. Daubigny specifically used a more historically and thus academically oriented work –Saint Jerome– to appeal to the critics and Salon jury. This, however, showed his youth and dependence on the period’s academic system.
The Prix de Rome competition began shortly after the Salon opening of 1841. He submitted a sketch of a historical landscape and “a tree standing out against the sky”.[ii] He passed the first two exams but did not realize that he was supposed to be present at the school the day before the third and final examination, lunching instead with a friend at Vincennes. Because of this oversight, Daubigny lost his chance to be considered for the 1841 Prix de Rome, which, in the end, allowed him to explore other avenues that would eventually take his art to a level of independence from established traditions that might not have otherwise developed had he been successful in the academic competition.
This was Daubigny’s last attempt at the Prix de Rome. He later began producing more illustrations for texts to earn his living, including La Pléiade and Le Jardin des Plantes. He also gained commissions under H. Delloye, such as Chants et Chansons Populaires de France, to which Trimolet and Steinheil also contributed. Despite his commitment to illustrations, he submitted regularly to the Salon during this period, taking occasional trips back to his childhood village of Valmondois to look for inspiration for his new prints and paintings. He received his first award —a second-class medal— at the 1848 Salon, which also brought him a state commission for an etching of Claude Lorrain’s Abreuvoir (Watering Hole). A state-commissioned etching clearly indicated that Daubigny, as a painter and a printmaker, had arrived at a point of acceptance in the art world. This was also when etching received more acceptance as an artistic medium, spearheaded in 1862 by Alfred Cadart and his Société des Aquafortistes, of which Daubigny was among the strongest supporters. Both media were important in Daubigny’s oeuvre throughout his career.

This popularity also incited criticism. Even in his early years, Daubigny showed an affinity with nature, which he combined with his personal style to create an individual body of work. Many critics of the period began to attack his work, often starting with a praiseworthy account of his recent submission to the Salon but ending with a charge against his poor execution. One account given after the Salon of 1852 typifies this misunderstanding of Daubigny’s work:
Mr. Daubigny is again to be found among the new landscapist group. I do not know anyone who was a more intimate feeling for nature, and who can better make it felt. But why does he only produce rough sketches like La Moisson and the Vue Prise sur les Bords de la Seine. This latter is particularly beautiful. Is Mr. Daubigny afraid of ruining his work by finishing it? But that would be an avowal of weakness. I have a better opinion of his talent and I am convinced that a man who has begun so well could not finish badly.[iii]
Like many young art students, he sought acceptance from the Salon, training in a historical landscape style, and attempting to win the Prix de Rome contest. Yet his interest in landscape painting began extending beyond that which he had been taught. Fidell-Beaufort and Bailly-Herzberg note that these remarks “…clearly demonstrate the twofold aspect of his art; first, the traditional, as a result of his academic training, the other, more revolutionary aspect, derived form his direct contact with nature.” [iv] This newer style, which incited so much controversy, was exactly that which would become an inspirational force for the younger generation of artists. Daubigny stressed independence form rules combined with his determination to leave his finished painting in the state of the sketch.
Daubigny’s appreciation of nature was nurtured through several trips he took in 1857. Besides traveling to Italy and Valmondois, he also went to Burgundy, Cremieu, and Lyon. He also traveled to Switzerland with his friend Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, a fellow landscape painter associated with the Barbizon School. Daubigny is also linked to the style despite never living in Barbizon. In 1857, he bought a small boat christened “the botin,” which included a covered room that he turned into a small studio. The honorary captain was his friend Corot, and his son was the cabin boy. He used this boat every summer for several years, floating along the Seine and capturing fragmentary moments of the light and landscape along the river. Daubigny began integrating water into his landscape paintings because of these boating trips, just as the Impressionists would later do.
Daubigny would remain an ardent supporter of emerging artists, including Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Paul Cézanne, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, among others, and he would, as a Salon juror, exercise his right of opinion. He was first elected to the Salon jury in 1865 but resigned when Pissarro and Cézanne’s works were rejected. Daubigny said that he “preferred paintings full of daring to the nonentities welcomed into each Salon.” [v] As a pacifist, resignation was Daubigny’s strongest form of protest. He also suggested to those rejected that they continually form a Salon des Refusés, a Salon for all of the refused artists as a protest against the Salon itself, as had happened in 1863. These were strong instigations from an artist who, in his early career, had worked so hard to be accepted at the Salon. He was also elected to the 1868 and 1870 Salon juries, further trying to use his position to support the younger modernists. Once again, in 1870, he resigned his position after the Salon jury rejected one of Monet’s submissions.

This same year, the Franco-Prussian war broke out. Daubigny moved his family to London, where many artists were seeking refuge. He was commissioned by the art dealer Durand-Ruel to complete three paintings based on sketches of Villerville, one of the many towns that Daubigny frequented. In another show of support for the younger artists, he tried to persuade Durand-Ruel to purchase pictures by Pissarro, Monet, and François Bonvin. He and his family returned to Paris after peace was concluded. He returned not only to Paris but also to his “Botin”, beginning his summers again along the Seine. He also set out on a journey to Holland with his son Karl, where they spent a short time sketching windmills along the river, inspiring a work that was exhibited at the 1872 Salon: Les Moulins de Dordrecht (The Windmills of Dordrecht).
At the 1873 Salon, it became clear that Daubigny’s work had become more “impressionistic”, though it was a year before the term became popularized. His painting, L’Effet de Neige (Effect of Snow) caused a flurry of criticism for its unfinished nature. These were exactly the complaints that would be held against the Impressionist group just a few years later.
He continued exhibiting at the Salon and served on the Salon jury of 1875 before resigning yet again because of the jury’s rigid standards. In 1876, he and his wife Sophie began traveling again, going through the valley of the Arques and then through Normandy. His previous afflictions with gout, bronchitis, and asthma were getting much worse as time passed. Work was increasingly difficult. He exhibited at the Salon for the last time in 1877, showing two paintings: Vue de Dieppe (View of Dieppe) and Lever de Lune (Moonrise). The summer of 1877 would be his last on his Botin, returning from this journey to work on a large-scale painting he could not complete. Daubigny died on February 19, 1878, in Auvers-sur-Oise.
Zacharie Astruc, one of the staunchest supporters of Edouard Manet’s work, wrote of Daubigny, “He is the painter of simple impression. He is tender; he is sweet; he is captivating… he retains a delicious naiveté - simple as a child before his subject, adding nothing, removing nothing-strong of heart and yes; unpretentious by means of the truth; arriving by force of feeling and by ardor and by his penetrating passion for his art at a remarkable individuality.” [vi] Daubigny’s career began in the atelier of an academic artist but progressed beyond the borders of this rigid training to become a symbol of inspiration for the coming movement of Impressionism. His support of the younger artists was unceasing and in his own work he remained true to the depiction of nature, meriting his association with the Barbizon group of landscape painters. Charles Daubigny, in his work and his life, became one of the key forces behind the introduction of new artistic movements while fighting his own battles for the acceptance of his work; one that was ahead of its time and misunderstood by many. Only with hindsight can audiences best appreciate the modern nature of Daubigny’s oeuvre with its commitment to independence and personal verve.
[i] Daubigny, Fidell-Beaufort, Madeleine and Janine Bailly-Herzberg (Paris: Editions Geoffroy-Dechaume, 1975), pg. 36
[ii] Fidell-Beaufort, Bailly-Herzberg, pg. 39
[iii] Fidell-Beaufort, Bailly-Herzberg, pg. 45
[iv] Ibid
[v] Fidell-Beaufort, Bailly-Herzberg, pg. 57
[vi] Fidell-Beaufort and Bailly-Herzberg, pg. 49
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