Spotlight on the artist who put Impressionism in the frame
The landscapes of Daubigny are brought to the forefront in a new exhibition
THE chances are that you have never heard of the artist Charles Francois Daubigny. A peer of Corot and Millet, he was viewed by his contemporaries as France’s foremost landscape painter, at the forefront of the move away from academic history painting towards work inspired by nature.
In his lifetime, he was so commercially successful he could afford to build not just one but two houses in Auvers-sur-Oise, the village north of Paris to which he moved later in his career.
But this major exhibition of Daubigny’s work is not just an overdue retrospective and rare presentation of works from some major galleries around the world.
It does what one peer of Daubigny’s once noted, and places him back in the vanguard of “the school of the Impression” as one of the sparks that fuelled the Impressionists fire.
The exhibition, a joint venture between the Taft Museum of Art in Cincinatti, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and the National Galleries of Scotland, was instigated some four years ago by the curator at the Taft who is “mad on Daubigny”, grins National Gallery senior curator Dr Frances Fowle, a specialist in French Impressionism, as we walk around amidst the clutter of installation week.
“We thought it would be good to broaden it out and put him in context, to look at why he is important.
“One of the reasons that he’s not better known is that his whole generation was eclipsed by what came next, but he is a really important link between the Romantic tradition of Turner and Constable and the Impressionists.
“A lot of his practice anticipated mainstream Impressionism,” says Fowle, who has concentrated mainly on Monet and Van Gogh (who revered the artist throughout his life) as artists who demonstrably owe much to the pre-eminent landscape painter. Part of that anticipation is in his methods, his innovations. Daubigny began, like most of his peers, painting the academic tableaux and history scenes that the conservative Salon of the Academy of Fine Arts in Paris dictated, the style sober and measured with minute attention to detail. But by 1854, the realistic, the natural, had taken centre stage, and his acclaim – and controversy – grew when his work, The Harvest, full of colour and a daring palette knife-sketched sky, was both acclaimed at the Salon that year and scorned by some critics.
Ten years later, his plein air painting of the cliffs at Villerville in Normandy, with its tempestuous skies and luminous light over the sea, brought him to the forefront of Salon painters.
“It’s an astonishing picture,” says Fowle, “a wonderful frontal seascape. The idea of being immersed in nature is very important to Daubigny.”
His influence became clear when the following year the young Monet submitted a work to the Salon that quite clearly took its inspiration from Daubigny.
By 1868, sitting on the board of the Salon, Daubigny passionately championed the works of the young Impressionists.
For Daubigny moved things on. If it was accepted that sketching might be done en plein air, the idea of completing a painting in the thick of the weather was not, but Daubigny helped make it so.
He took the idea to further extremes, too, repurposing an old ferry boat into a water-borne studio to row himself out into the middle of the river – and down it and along it and into the choppy and busy waters of some of northern France’s most bustling harbours – painting river landscapes from new perspectives and directly inspiring Monet to do the same.
There is an amusing sequence of sketches in a corner room from Daubigny’s Le Voyage en Bateau croquis a l’eau forte, a series of drawings done to entertain family and friends about his daily adventures on his boat “Le Botin”, subsequently made into etchings and published.
In one, Daubigny flounders, his oar breaking, caught in the sketch tumbling backwards into the bottom of the boat. In another, he dodges steamboats in the mouth of a busy river, his flat-bottomed, top-heavy studio boat pitching and yawing in the chop.
If his larger canvases are entirely serious, here is a picture of the man, sense of adventure and humour in full flow.
The exhibition is full of surprises, not least a reconstruction of his studio boat.
There is a room devoted to the Salon paintings of Daubigny and the early Impressionists, a series of connections between works, including a Daubigny and a Pisarro that Fowles points out could have been painted by the same man.
There is a room devoted to Daubigny and Monet’s travels to London and Amsterdam, to the men’s sometime obsessions with moonlight and sunsets.
In the final room, a series of impressive and emotive late Van Goghs, painted in Auvers-sur-Oise, the village where Daubigny lived and Van Gogh died, deck the walls with wheatfields and cottages including what was thought to be Van Gogh’s last painting (of Daubigny’s house).
Many are painted in the double square landscape format pioneered by the older artist. But here, a swathe of red on green stands out at the far end.
These are the poppy fields of Daubigny, Monet and Van Gogh.
“It’s quite interesting to look at the three,” says Fowles. “Daubigny’s skies most show his impressionistic leanings, while below it the composition is detailed and exacting.
“Monet’s is a straightforward landscape, much more modern in its approach, filled with light … and then Van Gogh takes things off in his own direction,” she smiles, looking at the intense, brilliantly hued brush strokes.
Encapsulated roughly in these three paintings is the evolution of French painting from realism to Impressionism and beyond.
Inspiring Impressionism is at the Scottish National Gallery, The Mound, Edinburgh, from tomorrow until October 2. An opening lecture, Daubigny - The Father of Modern Landscape?, is tomorrow at 2pm. www.nationalgalleries.org
‘‘ Daubigny is a really important link between the Romantic tradition of Turner and Constable and the Impressionists