| When Fields in the Month of June was shown in
the Salon of 1874, Daubigny's rapid juxtaposition of brushstrokes, absence
of detail, spots of brilliant color, and immediacy represented a dramatic
move away from the classical polish of official Salon painting. Courbet's
skilled use of the palette knife and Jules Breton's treatment of rural subject
matter contributed to Daubigny's style as much as the decision to work in
natural sunlight for a more direct translation of his settings. His innovative
treatment of landscape would, in retrospect, be viewed by historians as
a transitional moment between the style of the |
Salon (on whose jury he served) and the radical experiments of Pissarro,
Cezanne, Renoir, and Monet; Monet's painting of poppy fields was shown only
a year earlier and its rejection by the same Salon on whose jury Daubigny
served had provoked the latter's resignation. In 1872, Daubigny traveled
to the Netherlands, where he began his most important painting to date,
The Mills of Dordrecht. From his studio-barge, le botin, anchored at Auvers-sur-Oise,
Daubigny continued to rely on Corot's organizing tonality (which had been
his greatest influence as early as 1852), |
introducing in the Johnson Museum's monumental canvas vibrant accents and
soaring expanses of sky that dwarfed the peasants laboring in the horizontal
sweep of open field. One of his largest canvases, Fields in the Month
of June overwhelmed unaccustomed eyes by its sheer scale and perspective.
Not long before his death, van Gogh painted several versions of Daubigny's
garden at Auvers; he had admired, fifteen years earlier, the Barbizon artist's
"beautiful things" hanging in Goupil's London gallery. |
