The French painter and etcher Charles François Daubigny (1817-1878), a member of the Barbizon school, was one of the first landscape painters to work out of doors in a systematic way.

Charles Daubigny was born in Paris on Feb. 15, 1817. His father, Edmé François Daubigny, was a landscape painter, and his uncle and aunt were miniaturists. Daubigny made the customary trip to Italy (1835-1836) and did some ideal landscapes, but his eventual direction was more decisively shaped by Dutch landscape painting. In 1838 he enrolled as a student of the academic painter Paul Delaroche.

Although Daubigny enjoyed a reasonable success at the Salons, where he exhibited from 1838 on, graphic art in the form of etchings, woodcuts, lithographs, and illustrations contributed substantially to his income. Pond with Storks (ca. 1851), with its painstaking analytical detail, is a representative Barbizon school work; it also echoes Dutch art of...