Charles-Francois Daubigny

Charles-Francois Daubigny was born on 15 February 1817 in Paris, France. He received his first artistic training from his father, the painter Edme-Francois Daubigny, and from his uncle Pierre Daubigny, a miniaturist. Around 1835 he entered the Paris atelier of the academic painter Pierre Asthasie Theodore Senties and traveled to Italy to study the Old Masters. He later enrolled in Paul Delaroche's class at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, sources place this between 1838 and 1841, and debuted at the Paris Salon in 1838.

His reputation grew steadily through the following two decades. He won a second-class Salon medal in 1848, and The Pond at Gylieu, shown at the 1853 Salon, won a gold medal and was reportedly purchased by Napoleon III. He received first-class Salon medals in 1853, 1857, and 1859, a third-class medal at the 1855 Exposition Universelle, and a first-class medal at the 1867 Exposition Universelle. In 1859 he was named Chevalier of the Legion d'honneur, and he reportedly received a government commission around that time to decorate an office in the Louvre; he was promoted to Officier of the Legion d'honneur in 1874. At the 1873 Salon he was awarded the Grand Prix for The Snow, now in the Musee d'Orsay.

From the mid-1860s Daubigny served repeatedly on the Salon jury, where he became known for defending younger, more radical painters. He resigned from the 1870 Salon jury in protest after a painting by Monet was rejected. He worked extensively en plein air, notably from a small studio boat on the Oise known as Le Botin, and kept a house and studio in Auvers-sur-Oise, which he and friends including Corot and Daumier decorated with wall paintings; that house is preserved today as the Maison-Atelier de Daubigny.

Daubigny died on 19 February 1878, at the age of 61. The majority of major reference sources, including Encyclopaedia Britannica, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, ArtUK, and Artnet, give Paris as the place of death; one dealer biography (Rehs Galleries) states Auvers-sur-Oise instead. His remains are interred at the Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris. He continued to be honored posthumously, with his work shown at the 1878, 1889, and 1900 Paris Expositions Universelles.

Reception of Daubigny's work shifted over his career from qualified praise to broad acceptance. A critic writing in the Moniteur Universel in 1852 praised an "intimate feeling for nature" in his landscapes while dismissing them as "rough sketches" and asking whether Daubigny was "afraid of ruining his work by finishing it," a complaint that reflected mid-century discomfort with his loose, unfinished-looking technique. That same technique came to be seen, in retrospect, as an anticipation of Impressionism. The painter and critic Odilon Redon later described him, as recorded in Madeleine Fidell-Beaufort and Janine Bailly-Herzberg's biography of the artist, as a "painter of a moment, of an impression." Charles Baudelaire is also reported to have written approvingly of Daubigny's landscapes, though no source available for this profile could confirm his exact original wording, so no verbatim Baudelaire quotation is used here. Daubigny's active defense of younger Salon rejects, including Monet, reinforced his historical position as a bridge figure between Barbizon naturalism and Impressionism.

Public auction data for Daubigny is difficult to consolidate into a single all-time record. Among the higher documented results identified in available auction-price databases is Les bords de la Loire pres de Nantes (1875), which sold for EUR 35,280 at Christie's Paris (Online) on 14 June 2024, and a work reported as La Loire a Beaulieu, listed at USD 63,000 with the auction house and exact date not confirmed. Numerous other results, some well below USD 5,000, also appear in dealer and regional-auction listings, illustrating a market with a wide spread between routine and exceptional lots. No source available for this profile could confirm a definitive all-time high price for the artist, so collectors should treat any single reported figure with caution and confirm current results with an auction specialist before relying on them.

No published catalogue raisonne of Daubigny's work was confirmed for this profile. Authentication in practice relies on the 1975 Fidell-Beaufort and Bailly-Herzberg monograph, the archive of the Musee Daubigny and Maison-Atelier de Daubigny in Auvers-sur-Oise, and the expertise of auction houses and specialist 19th-century dealers. His work is held in dozens of major museums worldwide, from the Louvre and Musee d'Orsay to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery in London, which supports long-term scholarly and institutional interest. At the same time, the public auction record for Daubigny is comparatively sparse and difficult to pin to a single confirmed top price, so collectors should seek recent, specialist valuation before acting on any single historical figure.