Moonrise at Barbizon

Around 1845 Charles-François Daubigny worked near the village of Barbizon in the Forest of Fontainebleau. Unlike Jean-Baptist Camille Corot and Théodore Rousseau, this painter did not belong to the core group of the so-called Barbizon School. Daubigny was one of the first landscape painters to show an interest in the fleeting aspects of nature. He tried to capture the changing…

Around 1845 Charles-François Daubigny worked near the village of Barbizon in the Forest of Fontainebleau. Unlike Jean-Baptist Camille Corot and Théodore Rousseau, this painter did not belong to the core group of the so-called Barbizon School. Daubigny was one of the first landscape painters to show an interest in the fleeting aspects of nature. He tried to capture the changing look of nature in quick sketchy brushstrokes. However, what he did have in common with some members of the Barbizon School was a romantic approach, in which objective observation was softened by the artist’s empathy with his subject. In paintings like Moonrise at Barbizon, the motif of nature is subordinate to the sense of melancholy that the mysterious dusk of evening gave the artist.