Silverpoint

Lineage of Corot · French · 1817 to 1878

Charles-François Daubigny

Corot's travelling companion: river banks, poplars, boats, and the cliche-verre done properly.

Daubigny painted beside Corot, travelled with him to Switzerland and the Dauphine, and shared the cliche-verre experiments at Arras. He etched more than any Barbizon painter and better than most: the Voyage en Bateau set (1862) is a comic travel diary of life on his studio boat, and his larger plates of river banks, moonrises and poplars are landscape etching at its most natural.

He is the easiest of the Barbizon men to learn from because his compositions are so plain: a horizontal river, a vertical screen of trees, a sky that is two-thirds of the sheet. Copy three and you will have learned the format Corot used for the Souvenirs.

Apple Trees at Auvers (Pommiers à Auvers), Daubigny, 1877
Cleveland Museum of Art

Daubigny, Apple Trees at Auvers (Pommiers à Auvers), 1877. etching.

The Cleveland Museum of Art · Gift of John Bonebrake

What to steal

  1. 1The low horizon and the big sky, with the trees as a screen against it.
  2. 2Water laid in long horizontals, trees in short verticals.
  3. 3Daubigny's cliche-verre: scratch through a dark ground and let the light draw.

How to look

  • Where is the horizon? Measure it against the height of the sheet.
  • Find the single boat or figure that gives the river its scale.

Studies 3 guided · 13 plate copies

All 16 →

Works

16 public-domain