Day 315 - Daubigny Landscape

October 10, 2022

Gallery 812 is devoted to French landscapes, mostly dating from the 1850s and 1860s. They include several Courbets and what I learn is Rosa Bonheur’s most famous painting, “The Horse Fair,” a monumental effort that occupies most of one of the gallery's walls. I’d heard of Bonheur, of course, but I didn’t realize that she was known as an animal painter.

Today’s work is Charles-Francois Daubigny's 1873 oil painting of an apple orchard in flower.  The canvas, which measures approximately 32 inches wide and 20 inches high, strikes me as unusually fresh in appearance, with quick strokes used to portray the cirrus clouds scudding across the light blue sky as well as the blossoms and leaves of the gnarled tree in the foreground, which seem to be blowing in the breeze. The description says that Daubigny was admired by younger colleagues like Monet while at the same time he absorbed their palettes. The painting is not an Impressionist work, exactly, but proto-Impressionist, maybe?







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