Biography

Charles François Daubigny was a French painter known for being a part of the Barbizon School of painters along with Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Théodore Rousseau, and Jean-François Millet. Like other artists of the school, he practiced plein-air painting in the regions in and around the Fontainebleau Forest of France. Daubigny’s paintings lively brushstrokes and focus on natural light in his depictions of orchards in bloom, forest clearings, and river banks at dusk were widely admired and served as a primary influence for the younger generation of French Impressionist painters, including Claude Monet and Alfred Sisley. Born on February 15, 1817 in Paris, France, he learned to paint from his father, the Neoclassical landscape painter Edmé-François Daubigny. Today, his works are in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, the Louvre Museum in Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the National Gallery in London, the Neue Pinakothek in Munich, the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, among others. Daubigny died on February 19, 1878 in Paris, France.