The Duck Pond

Like his fellow Pre-Impressionist painters Camille Corot, Jean-François Millet, and Théodore Rousseau, Charles-François Daubigny produced numerous clichés verre, photographic prints from hand-drawn negatives. Typically, the artist painted a sheet of glass with an opaque ground and then drew with a needle; the clear glass of the scratched lines allowed light to pass through to the photographic paper during printing. For Daubigny, the ease of drawing on such a surface allowed a spontaneity and fluidity of line akin to pen-and-ink drawing, a trait seen here especially in the rapidly sketched marginalia at the top of this image.