Apple Blossoms
| Support Type: | Canvas |
| Paint Type: | Oil Paint |
| Current Location: | Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
| Location History: | The painting was owned by William H. Fuller in New York starting sometime before 1892. In 1898, it was sold at auction through the American Art Association in New York for $6,000, bought by John B. Randolph on behalf of Collis P. Huntington. Huntington owned it from then until his death in 1900. In his will, he left the painting to the Met, but with a condition: his widow, Arabella Huntington (who later remarried and became Mrs. Henry E. Huntington), got to keep it in her possession for the rest of her life. She held onto it until she died in 1924, after which their son, Archer Milton Huntington, briefly had that same life-interest right though it ended just a year later, in 1925, at which point the museum’s ownership became complete. |
One of the members of the Barbizon school and an outstanding landscape painter, Charles-Francois Daubigny’s paintings demonstrate a shift away from historical and mythological subjects to representing the French landscape within a naturalistic framework. “Apple Blossoms” is one of his landscape paintings, done in oil on canvas. It shows an orchard in bloom, a subject he returned to almost every spring starting in the late 1850s. He painted this version in 1873. It is currently housed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and is part of the Collis P. Huntington bequest of 1900. What’s notable is that the scene puts the viewer close to the ground, right inside the orchard rather than looking at it from a distance. This upholds the skill of Daubigny as an outstanding artist. Another interesting aspect associated with the painting is the use of quick, loose brushstrokes rather than fine detailing. This adds an element of spontaneity. The critic Theophile Gautier praised Daubigny’s landscapes as looking like real pieces of nature, simply framed in gold. That description fits “Apple Blossoms” well, as it doesn’t feel like a scene Daubigny carefully arranged. It feels more like something he came across and painted quickly, before the light could change. In the painting, the sky takes up a good portion of the canvas and is soft and overcast rather than bright, which keeps the whole scene feeling calm. However, the colours are brighter than what Daubigny used earlier in his career. That shift in color is worth noting. By 1873, Daubigny had spent years mentoring younger painters, particularly Monet, encouraging them to paint outdoors and work with light directly. In this painting, it is almost as if the influence ran the other way because the brighter palette looks closer to what Monet and the other Impressionists were doing by that point. Yet the calming effect remains intact, and the serene feeling is not lost. Rather, the painting radiates even more tranquility.
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