Plaque Charles-François Daubigny

The plaque sits at the western end of the Pléiades facade, on the Grande Rue. It carries a plain inscription: "Charles-François Daubigny, 1817-1878, landscape painter, lived in this house." Daubigny first came to Barbizon in 1843, with Constant Troyon. More a painter of rivers than of the forest, he explored the Seine, the Marne and the Oise aboard his studio boat, the Botin, acquired in 1857, and settled at Auvers-sur-Oise in 1860.

Daubigny arrived after the founding generation and never made his life in Barbizon as Millet and Rousseau did. In 1852 he became friends with Corot, more than twenty years his senior, who became a close friend: it was Corot who urged him to spend part of each year at Auvers, and who later painted panels for the entrance of his house there. In the autumn of 1870, a refugee in London during the war, Daubigny met the young Claude Monet and introduced him to the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, who would become the great champion of the Impressionists. The plaque at Les Pléiades marks a passage rather than a settling, and says so precisely: he lived in this house.