Le Lever du soleil

Description

Gallery Rotations Winter 2014
Charles-François Daubigny
France, 1817–1878
Sunrise (Le Lever du soleil)
1850
Etching and drypoint
Museum purchase, 1961/2.23
Although primarily celebrated as a landscape painter who was an important precursor to the Impressionists, Daubigny produced a number of remarkable etchings between 1850 and 1860. As a painter he was associated with the Barbizon group, active in the middle of the nineteenth century, who carried their easels out into the countryside southeast of Paris to paint directly from nature. The goal was not to rework nature to conform to a classical ideal, but to record it as the artist saw and experienced it. This etching, in which the warm light of the morning gradually illuminates the landscape, was likely created in the studio, but it preserves the sketch-like quality of an immediate response to the natural world.