Banks of the Loing

Daubigny, a famous French landscapist, belonged to the group of artists of the Barbizon School, who took their name from the village of Barbizon, near Paris, where they worked. Daubigny painted nearly all his works from life, with the exception of large canvases. At the end of the 1850s the artist built a boat-studio, on board of which he created many landscapes travelling along the rivers Loing, Oise and Seine. Here we see a sunny summer day. The composition resembling a fragment of a large panorama is built up of alternating planes in a manner typical of Daubigny: a blue ribbon of the river, then a bank with its emerald-green grass, a little village in the distance, and the pale blue sky with floating clouds. The tiny bright red spots which indicate the cottage roofs reinforce the sense of spatial depth. Daubigny?s method of working in the open air, the light palette and the broad, free painterly style anticipated the work of the Impressionists.