He was the son of
a well-known miniature painter, and passed his youth in the country,
where he imbibed the love for simple nature which he afterwards
rendered with less of fervor than Rousseau, with less poetry than
either Corot or Dupre; but, in his way, with as much or more of truth.
His task was easier. In the progress which landscape painting had
made, there were hosts of younger painters, each adding a particle
of truth, each making an advance in technical skill and daring,
and Daubigny profited by it all. Corot, it is true, had never been
afflicted with the preoccupation of combining the freshness of nature
with the _patine_ with which ages had embrowned the old gallery
pictures; but Daubigny, looking at nature with a more literal eye than
Corot, ran a gamut of color greater than he. It was Daubigny who said
of Corot, in envious admiration: "He puts nothing on the canvas, and
everything is there." His own more prosaic nature took delight in
enregistering a greater number of facts. Floating quietly down the
rivers of France in a house-boat, he diligently reproduced the sedgy
banks, the low-lying distances the poplars and clumps of trees lining
the shore, and reflected in the waters. He painted the "Springtime,"
now in the Louvre, with lush grass growing thick around the apple
trees in blossom; with tender greens, soft, fleecy clouds, and the
moist, humid atmosphere of France; without preoccupation of rich
color, of "brown sauce," of "low tone," of the thousand and one
conventions which have enfeebled the work of men stronger than he.
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