Painting Detail
Banks of the OiseArtist: Charles-Francois Daubigny
Medium: Painting, Oil on canvas, 25.5x41 cm
Date: Late 1850s
Genre: Landscape
Source: Collection of O. Ovsyannikova, Petrograd, 1919
Daubigny painted nearly all his works from the life, with the exception only of larger canvases. This was typical for artists of the Barbizon School, who took their name from the village of Barbizon, near Paris, where they worked. At the end of the 1850s the artist built himself a floating studio, on board which he created many lanscapes as he travelled along the rivers Oise and Seine.
Here we see a sunny summer day, in what seems like a fragment of some larger panorama. The composition is built up of alternating planes in a manner typical of Daubigny: the blue ribbon of the river, then the bank with its emerald green grass, the little village in the distance, and at the top the pale blue sky with its fast-scudding clouds. The tiny bright red spots which indicate the cottage roofs reinforce the sense of spacial depth. The method of working in the open air, the light palette and the broad, free painting style anticipate the work of the Impressionists.