The Confluence of the Rivers Seine and Oise Charles-François Daubigny

Daubigny’s painting is an exact replica of a successful piece titled Banks of the Oise, Vaux Island, which was displayed in the Salon held in 1859 in the Palace of Industry (ChampsElysées) in Paris. In a letter to his daughter the painter gave an account of him making a very exact, albeit smaller-scale copy of the original composition in the Bordeaux museum. The picture he referred to is now held by the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest. The original painting was first owned by the French photographer, Nadar (GaspardFélix Tournachon, 1820–1910), who sold it to the Bordeaux museum. Daubigny eventually received numerous commissions to paint replicas of the popular picture, which he all fulfilled for obvious financial reasons.
After the Salon of 1859, Edmond Duranty (1833 –1880) praised Daubigny’s landscape painting, noting in his review in the 19 April 1859 issue of the daily paper Le Courrier de Paris that ‘Les plus patients paysagistes, tels que M. Daubigny, n’ont pas cette puissance facile [compared with Delacroix] et pour ainsi dire dédaigneuse qui ne semble qu’ébaucher et qui produit le sentiment le plus large et le plus fini, cette puissance qui sait faire grand’.
Daubigny rendered the twilight as it appeared in the original painting beautifully in all the nine copies he made in the 1860s (now in Musée de Reims, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, private collections, etc.). The calm of the river, the motif of the trees reflecting in it, as well as the contrast between the vegetation and the water surface would recur in a more modern style in the radiant impressionist compositions a few years later, while the influence of Netherlandish painting can
be observed in the atmosphere of the picture, the boat swaying in the centre and the way the sky is painted. This kind of art, which had previously been undervalued in France, was highly esteemed and analysed in the mid-nineteenth century Parisian circles of art criticism by Théophile Gautier (1811–1872) and Théophile Thoré-Bürger (1807–1869), and the Dutch-Flemish tradition subsequently served as a source of inspiration for geniuses from Édouard Manet to Paul Cézanne.
The everyday attitudes of ordinary people played an important role in the nineteenth-century history of mentalities. The earlier majestic and pantheistic
landscapes were replaced by friendly riverbanks of neighbouring towns and villages and would soon be filled with merry groups of holiday-makers in
the emblematic paintings of the impressionist. In any case, the large number of commissions for Daubigny’s almost photographically realistic landscape, the first prize it won at the Salon, and the Order of the Legion of Honour awarded to
the painter confirm that this depiction of the environment met with the taste of contemporary public.

Judit Geskó