Charles-François Daubigny, 'Willows', 1872 or 1874

A wooded bank and lake open onto a vista of trees and pasture. At the left two boys are fishing. A fishing rod leans on the bank, and the right-hand boy is peering into a basket, perhaps at his catch. The scene is purely imaginary, and would have been painted in the studio. It is in fact the last in a series of four versions of the same composition, all with the title Fishing for Crayfish. This canvas is broadly handled, thickly and loosely painted, with rapid, sketchy brushwork particularly a feature of the sky. In handling the work can be compared with Corot’s late landscapes, particularly in the painting of the trees and sky. Like Corot, Daubigny sketched the trees in thin paint before painting the sky around them, lastly adding foliage with touches of green.

The most striking feature is the treatment of the sunset at the right. The sky is tinged pink at the horizon, and the fiery colours of the setting sun – yellows, peaches, pinks and red – are reflected in the water between the trees. Daubigny added these at a late stage in painting, as the touches of paint appear to have been squeezed between the dense tree trunks.

The artist painted a number of sunsets as part of his repertoire of river landscapes, and a similar effect can be found in his Landscape with Cattle by a Stream. In another late painting, The Cooper (private collection), which he showed at the Salon of 1872, he again explores the effect of light shining through gaps between tree trunks. The critic Jules Claretie compared the effect to that of fireworks: ‘this sun which pierces the foliage of the trees makes its mark and bursts out of the frame like fireworks’.