Untitled 

Curator: This is an untitled landscape painting by Charles-François Daubigny, an artist associated with the Barbizon school and plein-air painting. He mainly worked with oil paint. Editor: My first thought is about its peaceful, almost dreamlike quality. The muted colors and hazy atmosphere create a sense of tranquility, perhaps even melancholy. There’s an intimate scene off to the side of a figure beneath a tree. Curator: Absolutely. Daubigny, influenced by Romanticism, often depicted rural scenes to reflect a deeper engagement with nature. These escapes offer refuge away from an increasingly industrialized society. Considering gendered and class relations in the mid-19th century, this retreat to nature becomes charged with meanings tied to identity and freedom, an imagined alternative to urban alienation. Editor: The materiality really sings. It appears Daubigny utilized a technique to create that sense of atmospheric perspective, likely thinning the oil paint to create luminous glazes, a material process in service of depicting light and atmosphere. You also get a feeling about Daubigny’s own labor here. This wasn’t made in a studio. Curator: The very act of painting "en plein air," directly engaging with the landscape, marks a shift. How might the choice of painting nature at dusk impact our understanding of gender? This decision places us at a liminal time and offers opportunities to contemplate alternative spaces and ways of being. The subtle figures add a layer of intrigue. Are they observing or merely part of the scenery? What power relations are evident? Editor: True. It brings to mind questions around the working conditions and accessibility for artists painting outdoors at that time, particularly for women, and how the tools available would facilitate this kind of fleeting captured experience of the landscape. Curator: This has prompted me to think further about how landscapes reflect and reinforce social ideologies concerning accessibility and gender. Editor: Likewise, examining the practical and material considerations enriches the viewers ability to imagine art's production and impact.