38 Artists & IllustratorsWHAT VAN GOGH ADMIRED IN DAUBIGNY
WAS THE STRENGTH OF HIS CONNECTION
TO THE SOIL AND HONESTY OF HIS
RESPONSE TO NATUREexplains that a study of her garden has already been
painted and that an idea for ‘a more important canvas of
Daubigny’s house and garden’ is being prepared. What the
letter doesn’t indicate, however, is a sense of how Mme
Daubigny received her visitor, a scruffy Dutchman, an
unsuccessful painter and a heavy drinker, recently released
from an asylum in the south.
What we know is that at some point in June of 1890, Van
Gogh received permission to paint in the garden of Mme
Daubigny. But, how was that permission granted? In June
the previous year, the artist had described Daubigny’s
landscapes as ‘so heartbreaking, so personal’. Did Van
Gogh explain to Mme Daubigny exactly what her husband’s
landscapes had meant to him? When, 15 years before, in
1873, the period when Van Gogh was working in Paris, he
would often go to the Musée du Luxembourg to admire
Daubigny’s Spring, one of the paintings in the gallery to
really make an impression on him.
First exhibited in Paris in 1857, Spring depicts a young
woman sitting on a donkey, which stands in a diagonalpathway of flattened wheat. This path invites the viewer’s
gaze into the picture, leading towards two figures – the
young woman’s lovers, it is speculated – who lie half-
concealed in the grass beyond her.
Described at the time as ‘an idyll of renewal in all its
green and greenery’, works such as Spring – relying not
only on the meticulous control of tonal values, but also on
discreet compositional structuring – had earned Daubigny
a reputation as one of France’s finest landscapists. But
what Van Gogh admired in Daubigny – almost as much as
in Jean-François Millet – was the strength of his connection
to the soil and the honesty of his response to nature. “Van
Gogh’s work is of course highly expressive,” argues Frances
Fowle, curator of Inspiring Impressionism at the National
Gallery of Scotland, “but to him he was actually trying to
develop on that primitive response to the landscape, which
he admired in those earlier painters.”
There had been times in the past when certain
landscapes had provided him with solace insofar as they
reminded him of Daubigny. In 1883, a year after moving toABOVE Vincent Van
Gogh, Daubigny’s
Garden, 1890
oil on canvas,
50x101.5cm
TOP RIGHT Charles
Francois Daubigny,
Landscape by
Moonlight, oil on
panel, 35x57.3cm
BOTTOM RIGHT
Charles François
Daubigny,
Ferryboat near
Bonnières-sur-
Sein, 1861, Oil on
canvas,- 2 x 9 3. 3 c m
36 Daubigny final.indd 38 12/05/2016 09:50