Le Ruisseau Dans La Clairière (The Brook in the Clearing)

Paris, 1862. Cliché-verre on lightweight photosensitive wove paper, 8 3/4 x 7 1/8 inches (220 x 180 mm) (sheet), full margins. Signed in the plate, lower right. Because this impression is printed on lightweight photosensitive paper, lacks a cancellation mark, and does not have 20th century publisher's seal; our opinion is that this is a lifetime impression.

[Deltiel 137]. Daubigny was one of the first artists to explore the qualities of changing daylight and the effect it had on natural landscapes. In 1842 he began to travel frequently, and spent time in the woods of Fontainebleau and later in Burgundy, where he befriended Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot. The two painted together in Switzerland and the Dauphiné. In 1857, Daubigny purchased a boat on which he built a floating studio. His mobile studio on the water gave him enormous freedom to select the optimal viewpoints for rendering landscapes in relation to shifting light, and he spent hours upon hours exploring the delights of the Oise, the Marne, and the Seine rivers.

In 1859 Daubigny received the Legion of Honor, and a year later he built a home and studio in Auvers. It was here that he focused on printmaking as a medium, largely in response to emerging criticism that his painted canvasses had become sketchy and dark. He found that etching fulfilled his stylistic inclinations, and he participated in an exhibition funded by the print publishing house Cadart in 1862. Subsequently Cadart became Daubigny's exclusive print publisher. Daubigny and his Barbizon School colleagues Corot, Rousseau, and Millet, had the opportunity to experiment with the completely new photographic reproductive process of cliché-verre. The Brook in the Clearing is an early example of one of these works.

The process of creating a cliché-verre combines painting, printmaking and photography. The image is brushed onto a glass plate with ink, then rubbed and burnished away in desired areas, forming the final composition. The glass plate is placed on photosensitive paper in a dark room, it's then exposed to daylight with the glass plate essentially acting as a photographic negative, and the image emerging through luminosity. Daubigny continued to explore the effects of light as he evolved the methods of its expression in his compositions. Unlike Corot, Rousseau, and Millet, it is thought that Daubigny did the lion's share of the printing of his cliché-verres himself. It's very likely Daubigny held this particular work in his hands.