Charles-François Daubigny created this painting, Kérity view: Fountain, with oil on wood. Daubigny, like many landscape painters of the 19th century, worked directly from nature. He would have applied these strokes quickly, to capture the light and feeling of the scene. The result is a close transcription of immediate experience. But there’s something else going on here too. Notice the rather somber tonality. Though he was aligned with the Impressionists, Daubigny’s work has a weight to it that they generally avoided. You get a real sense of the labor involved in working the land, of life lived close to the soil. And the artist has used a very direct, economical application of paint. In the end, it is Daubigny’s sensitivity to both material and subject that makes this such a compelling little painting. It reminds us that even the most apparently straightforward landscapes carry social and cultural meaning.