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Overview
As famous for his original etchings as for his paintings, Charles-François Daubigny (1817-78) holds a prime position in mid-19th century French art. A leading artist of the Barbizon landscape school, he directly influenced the following generation of Impressionist painters and is a great precursor of the movement though highly impressive in his own right.
This small, densely worked, rustic-themed print could easily be mistaken for an etching. In fact it's a great example of the cliché-verre medium, a method of either etching (as here), painting or drawing on a transparent surface, such as glass, thin paper or film and printing the resulting image on a light sensitive paper in a photographic darkroom. The process was first practised by a number of French painters in the early 1860s, Camille Corot and Daubigny being the most famous.
Originals are rare in the extreme. This print comes from a portfolio of 40 individually mounted cliché-verre prints by Corot, Daubigny, Delacroix, Millet and Théodore Rousseau, which were printed from plates held in the collection of M. Cuvelier and published by Maurice Le Garrec in 1921.
See:
Old Master Print, 'Charles-François Daubigny (Paris 1817-1878 Paris)', http://www.oldmasterprint.com/daubigny2.htm
Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clich%C3%A9_verre
Dr Mark Stocker Curator Historical Art April 2018