Art: Father of Impressionism

Until the mid-19th century, nobody looked at a landscape while painting it. An artist could sketch out of doors, but he repaired to his studio to finish his work. Nature, the neoclassicists held, needed ennoblement by man: the faithful reproduction of it was imitation rather than creativity.

Some dissident painters who left Paris for the leafy countryside around Barbizon changed all that. One such artist, Charles Francois Daubigny,* bought a 29-ft. houseboat which he named Le Botin and turned into a floating studio. For 21 years he sailed the waterways of France in search of nature as freshly seen as newly picked lettuce, and he was a more influential forerunner of impressionism than all the others.

Misplaced Piety. Barbizon painters yearned for compassion in an era of harsh industrialization. Later they fell into disfavor for supposed sentimentality, but now scholars have resurrected them from the charge of Victorian piety and have shown that their passion for nature was closer to the scientific quests of Darwin than to unqualified love for small dogs and flowers. Now the U.S.’s first exhibition of Daubigny, some 82 oils, prints, and drawings, is on view at an out-of-the-way but ambitious institution, the Paine Art Center and Arboretum in Oshkosh, Wis.

For a living, in the 1840s, Daubigny worked for travel books and magazines, doing graphics of a candidness that showed his immediate vision of nature. The more dependent his landscapes became on fleeting optical visions, the flatter they grew, as if no matter how far away an object was, it registered equally on his retina. In the eight years between Morning on the Oise and Field in June, Daubigny traded the traditional depth of his predecessors for the surface impact of red poppies. Eventually, even such panoramas were replaced by the narrower vision that the eye can encompass without moving.

Rough Drafts. “He copies nature with his soul,” wrote a French critic in 1857 of Daubigny. Unlike his forerunners, Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin, the gentle naturalist looked more to the effects of nature than to rearranging its contours into earthen architecture. He and his Barbizon mates abandoned the brown studies of strong lights and darks that the Dutch masters used to dramatize thickets and glades that never existed outside their minds. Instead, Daubigny sketched directly from nature, in the volatile light and weather of the moment.

For such a precise, scientifically honest approach, Daubigny was criticized by some of the best brains of his times. In 1861, the French author Théophile Gautier tut-tutted Daubigny, said that his paintings were just “rough drafts.” He continued: “It is really too bad that this landscape painter, who possesses such a true, such a just, and such a natural feeling, is satisfied by an impression and neglects details to this extent.” Scornfully, Gautier noted that the brushwork was “merely spots of color juxtaposed.”

As history shows, the French impressionists went on to make “spots of color juxtaposed” into the greatest art movement of the century.

* Other greats of the Barbizon school: Jean Baptiste Camille Corot, Jean François Millet, Théodore Rousseau.