River Scene

Charles-François Daubigny was one of nineteenth-century France’s most accomplished landscape painters. He began to explore the river valleys outside Paris in the late 1850s from Le Bottin, his floating studio. His pictorial experiments would greatly influence Claude Monet and all other plein air painters of his time, including Oller.

For this scene, Daubigny selected a viewpoint in the center of the waterway, looking down a long stretch of the river and up toward the bank where herdsmen coax their cattle onto a barge. The tranquil water and the reassuringly peaceful coexistence of humankind and nature made such paintings highly popular with Daubigny’s urban clientele.